Your Favorite App Might Be Gone! Apple & Google Removed Dangerous App
Apple and Google, both have a track record of having apps causing malicious threats and user privacy risks. Not only in 2025, where they pulled as many as 20 apps from their respective app stores when found researchers that they were carrying data-stealing malware. Also in 2019, where both of the tech giants were accused of having malicious advertising apps in operation. The group behind the app became more sophisticated attacking both the Android and iOS ecosystem.
Backstory:
It all started in March 2023, when ESET researchers discovered that cybercrimes have found a new way of stealing user privacy. They were implanting malware embedded into various messaging app mods. Some of these scanned users’ image galleries in search of crypto wallet access recovery phrases. The most shocking part was this was happening in around 80 Android Apps and 9 in the Apple App Store, all applications were downloaded at least 13 million times. Huge Risk.
The same signs were found in 2025 as well when security researchers from Kaspersky discovered malware activities in SparkCat. Initially, it was diagnosed in a UAE food app but later found the signs in 19 others which were downloaded more than 242,000 times by Google’s Play Store.
Cryptocurrency at Risk?
This time the main target was cryptocurrency, however, other removed app names weren’t disclosed. They were using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which uses code designed to capture text visible on the user’s display. Researchers found the malware scanned the image galleries on victims’ devices to find recovery phrases (keywords) for cryptocurrency wallets across various languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
By doing so, they could gain complete control over a victim’s wallet and steal their funds. Not only money, they can extract your personal information from screenshots and messages. Google somehow protected their users from this known version of malware through the built-in Google Play Protect security feature.
Upon raising concerns, Apple & Google both removed compromised Apps from their respective stores last week.
According to Fernandez (A google spokesperson), All the identified apps are removed from Google Play and Develops making it are banned Apple hasn’t responded to any questions yet but somehow the real question is:
Will Tech Giants be able to tackle user privacy concerns and make their platforms safe and secure? Or will they continue their mistakes and let huge cyber crimes be committed on their platforms?
Stay tuned to learn more.
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