Security researchers at SophosLabs have discovered at least 15 adware apps on the Play Store found to be generating intrusive and fraudulent ads.
According to SophosLabs, once unsuspecting users download any of them, the adware apps will then hide their apps icon in the launcher so as to make it difficult for the user to find and remove them.
"SophosLabs recently discovered 15 apps on Google's Play market that engage in such practices; They generate frequent, large, intrusive ads and literally hide their app icons in the launcher in order to make it difficult for you to find and remove. Several of them go a step further by disguising themselves in the phone's App settings page," Sophos blog read.
All the apps are said to have been published on the Google Play Store this year, and so popula have they become that the Google Play Store's pages for these apps shows that over 1.3 million Android devices worldwide have installed at one of them.
To woe Play Store users to install them, these apps will masquerade under names such QR code readers, image editors, backup utilities, or some kind of utility app with an enticing app. When they are eventually downloaded, the apps will then disguised using names such as Google Play Store, Update, Backup, Time, etc, which only appears in the phone's settings.
Some of the apps will go a step further to make the user think that the app has crashed because it incompatible with the users device.
"When first launched, the app displays a message that says 'This app is incompatible with your device!'," the Sophos post read. "You might think that the app has crashed, because, after this 'crash,' the app opens the Play Store and navigate to the page for Google Maps, to mislead you into thinking that the ubiquitous Maps app is the cause of the problem. It is not. This is a ruse."
"The app then hides its own icon so it doesn't show up in the launcher's app tray. Others in the list hide their icon, too: Some do this on the first launch, while others simply wait for a while after you install the app," the blog post added.