Google Ends Play Store Security Reward Program

(RTTNews) - Google Play Store's reward program for security researchers who find vulnerabilities in popular Android apps would be discontinued on August 31, the company announced in an email to participating researchers.

The tech giant said that the decision to end the program was made due to a decrease in the number of actionable vulnerabilities reported, which Google attributes to "the overall increase in the Android OS security posture and feature hardening efforts, we've seen fewer actionable vulnerabilities reported by the research community".

Google Play Security Reward Program was launched in 2017 to encourage researchers to responsibly identify and report vulnerabilities in exchange for rewards.

Initially, researchers could earn up to $5,000 for identifying and disclosing vulnerabilities related to remote code execution, and up to $1,000 for disclosing vulnerabilities leading to the theft of insecure private data.

In July 2019, the Alphabet Inc. (GOOG)-owned company increased the rewards to $3,000 for theft of insecure private data vulnerabilities and up to $20,000 for those related to remote code execution.

Later, Google confirmed in August 2019 that it had paid out over $265,000 in rewards to the developers through the program.

Over time, the program started covering developers of Facebook, Amazon (AMZN), Alibaba (BABA), Spotify, Telegram, Tesla (TSLA), Zomato, and TikTok, among many other popular Android apps.

"Final reward decisions will be made before September 30th when the program is officially discontinued. Final payments may take a few weeks to process," the email noted.