Google offers Advanced Protection for personal or business Google Accounts of those who work with sensitive data like political campaign teams, journalists, activists and business leaders. To enhance security its security, Google is adding new updates that will turn on Play Protect app scanning automatically and limited apps from outside the Play Store.
Google will be blocking the majority of these non-Play apps from being installed on any devices with an account enrolled in Advanced Protection. Non-Play apps can only be installed now if they were pre-installed by the manufacture or through the Android Debug Bridge. Those apps that were already installed though will not be affected and users can continue to update them.
The second change that Google is making with Advanced Protection accounts is that they are turning on Play Protect app scanning by default and will remain enabled. This will ensure that users are protected by Google’s machine learning algorithms against constantly evolving threats.
These changes all roll out to all Google Accounts that are enrolled in Advanced Protection and Google is also announcing new malware protections for Chrome later this year.