Forum Discussion
Is there any way to disable Google Play Protect (GPP) from an EMM or to otherwise whitelist apps from scanning?
Hi all,
My name is Melanie and I am a Product Manager on the Android Enterprise team. Lizzie highlighted your discussion here back to our team. Thank you for your feedback and the useful discussion.
Reading through your feedback, we’ve picked up on a point that was consistently mentioned around private company apps being scanned, so we wanted to provide you with some additional information around this.
Google Play Protect (GPP) is designed to help protect against malware. By default, GPP asks users to send unknown applications to Google for scanning. This is because apps installed via Google Play or Managed Google Play are already scanned, but applications side-loaded (including installed through EMM installers) are not. This is what triggers the "Send app for a security check?" dialogue.
Several of you mentioned you would prefer not to send private company apps, especially on company-owned devices, externally to Google servers. The servers involved in this processing are kept isolated and protected within Google, but we still acknowledge that some organizations may prefer not to upload any data to external servers.
Additionally, we acknowledge that the “Send app for a security check” message can be confusing to device users, especially as they may not be the app or device owners and are therefore unable to make a decision on this.
Based on all of your feedback you’ve provided, last week we made a change preventing unknown applications (e.g. private side-loaded apps) from being uploaded to Google servers on Fully Managed devices or Managed Work Profiles.
Please note that GPP is still running on these devices as usual, and is still comparing these apps to known PHAs. (So if an app is highly likely to be a PHA, users will still see the "Harmful app blocked" dialogue.) We’ll be updating our GPP Help Centre article shortly to reflect this change.
This change went live across all online devices on September 6th.
Thank you once again for your feedback and we look forward to hearing more across the community conversations. If you have any additional questions on this, please do feed them via Lizzie.
Melanie
Hello karam, JamesKnight and RickB,
Great to meet you. Thanks for your comments and feedback.
As you may have seen from you comment above, I'd love to learn a little more about what you and others are experiencing. ie. are there particular apps that this issue happens with? Also, do you have any suggestions on how you'd like to improve this, whilst also keeping that balance between security and user experience.
Thanks again,
Lizzie
Could just be ignorance on my part, for which I apologise, but the frustration arose when I could see an option (blue slider button style) to turn off GPP from its settings and a pop up asking whether to turn off or cancel would come up, but even if I clicked on the turn off option it just wouldn't actually do it - not even any error message to say why. What's the point of showing it as a changeable setting when it can't change was the frustration. As others have said, no problem if you want to have protection for apps through the Google Play channel, but for various reasons it is often the case where Android is used to implement a dedicated device that you don't want the risk of application instability (or becoming vapour ware) due to some unsolicited intervention
