NEW DELHI: Google has removed more than 2,000 loan apps from its Android Play Store since January 2022, as these apps did not meet the company’s policy. “These two thousand apps were from India’s play store. If the app doesn’t meet our goal or it doesn’t meet our policy, we are going to act on it,” said Saikat Mitra, senior director, and head of trust and safety at Google Asia-Pacific.
Mitra further said the company collects the data itself, evaluates and then collates it from offline, third-party sources. This information could include details such as acts of customer harassment over phone calls made by these instant loan service providers.
Google was forced to take action after several started surfacing regarding instant loan apps on mobile app stores. These instant loan apps usually target people from low-income groups by offering loans of anywhere between Rs 2,000 and Rs 10,000.
They charge a high-interest rate, as high as 50 per cent per annum. As per a Reserve Bank India (RBI) estimate, there were over 1,100 such apps available for Indian Android users across 80 application stores (till last year). According to RBI, out of these as many as 600 were illegal apps. ED is believed to be investigating over 300 of them.