Are there phones where Google can remotely remove content from their local storage?
That’s unacceptable
That’s unacceptable
This feature was built to kill malware and viruses. Not even all malware in case of mobile devices, only the particularly bad malware that a "this app is infected with a virus" popup isn't enough for to get rid of.
It's not exactly a novel technique either. Most game cracks for Windows are part of one malware database or another, which is why every crack comes with instructions to disable your antivirus software for that particular binary. At some point only the actually infected cracks were being flagged, and in some cases the cracks employ malware-like mechanisms to redirect control flow, but many of these programs will be flagged by AV databases simply for being cracks.
Most of the topics where people complain about these types of remote uninstalls are based on pirated games from sketchy sources. It's hard to say if there's actually a virus at play in those situations, but based on the symptoms described ("all APKs I install are marked as viruses") I would think there is some kind of malicious APK modification process going on in a few of these cases.
You can remotely wipe them, install or uninstall applications from a browser logged into your Google Account and Google has already deleted apps from users phone since at least over a decade ago [1].
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2010/06/exercising...
It is not just «remov[ing]», it is also planting. (You should remember the case of remotely installing free music albums - which woke up a number of people about "they can plant files on my phone?!".)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-ar...
There needs to be a law against this.
when would this feature have started in Android (versions etc.), which are the most important events showing what they can do or not, etc.