Every now and then Google raids its own store in order to get rid of its more undesirable elements. That is what happened this time, too: Google has removed many of its trash-apps, like ones that only offer advertisements, cryptocurrency miners, apps that copy-past content of others or the infamous ”Elsagate”-esque apps that imitates child-friendly content but actually contains disturbing images and/or pornography.
Bitcoin mining apps were particulary hard hit – ALL of the cryptocurrency mining applications are now gone from Google Play. The main reason for such drastic measures is the fact that bitcoin miners from Google’s store were limited to a given set of rules describing how much power they can take from a given device, how much currency can they make, how transparent they have to be etc. As you can imagine, many of these apps completely disregarded these rules, giving us, for example, applications that completely failed to notify their users of the fact that they are bitcoin mining. Apps that remotely control other bitcoin mining devices are still available for download.
Terms of Use of Google Play have just become more rigid. It seems that Google did not want to do a one-time cleanup of their store but intends for things to stay more transparent. Good for us.