Google has reportedly removed almost 600 “disruptive” Android apps from their Play Store, as well as banned the developers who made the apps. This is their latest effort in tackling mobile ad fraud and the problem it’s caused all involved. Google announced this on their blog yesterday, and a major concern it addresses is disallowing ads that display when an app isn’t in use, or that tricks users to click on ads by mistake.

Google has removed almost 600 “disruptive” Android apps from the Play Store and banned their developers in its latest effort to rein in mobile ad fraud, the company announced on Thursday. Google’s policy does not allow ads that display when an app is not in use or that trick users to click on ads by mistake. Which is a good thing, as even I’ve written a story about how Google’s Play Store is a free-for-all where everything goes, especially for mobile games.

Google’s definition of disruptive ads are “ads that are displayed to users in unexpected ways, including impairing or interfering with the usability of device functions.”. This relates to ads that go full-screen and pops up during a call or when using navigation apps, which I just found out was a thing. What kind of apps do this again?

Per Bjorke, Senior Project Manager for Ad Traffic Quality who wrote the blog post had this to say on how Google is counteracting these malicious ads:

“Malicious developers continue to become more savvy in deploying and masking disruptive ads, but we’ve developed new technologies of our own to protect against this behavior. We recently developed an innovative machine-learning based approach to detect when apps show out-of-context ads, which led to the enforcement we’re announcing today.”

This essentially helps them to better detect ads that are out of context in apps and helped them ban the developers found to be infringing on Google’s rules. According to a BuzzFeed News report, most of the apps who violated these rules were developers from India, Singapore, and China. These ads were also aimed at a majority of English-speaking users. Cheetah Mobile, a publicly traded company in China, is one of the offenders had more than 40 of their apps pulled from the Play Store in the latest wave of bans. No surprises there.