Undoubtedly the Android marketplace is expanding, but it is also lead by increased malware attacks and now, pirated games. This has increased the concern among game developers who are facing threats for their products. As the Android market is not too regulated like Apple’s, the result is coming up in the form of copyright infringements and risk of increased malware-laden apps. What most of the app developers believe that the lack of discoverability and ease of copying and republishing is turning the Android Market toxic.

We have heard different incidents of copyright infringement and pirated game versions from several app developers including Sinister Planet’s maker Kevin Baker and The Wars is a paid-for game’s Chillingo. In a conversation with Guardian, Baker told,

“I have a game on the market called Sinister Planet which was released about eight months ago. Sales have been pretty slow, although picking up slowly over the months, despite a lot of great reviews. One of my customers emailed me three weeks ago, and informed me that another company was selling a version of my app – pirated and uploaded as their own. Of course I contacted Google right away. It took Google two days to take the app down. This publisher was also selling other versions of pirated games. I contacted the original developers of those games but they were still being sold a week later.

“I would also note that the publisher selling the pirated games is still trading on the Android Market. They didn’t even get their account suspended. If there’s going to be malware hidden inside apps, it’s that the exact place where it would be? Why are these accounts still allowed to be trading?”

We got some valuable insights from Lookout Mobile Security’s App Genome Project that highlighted some alternative marketplace trends including following:

• Nearly 11% of the apps also available on the Android Market were found to be repackaged.
• Of these repackaged apps, a quarter request more permissions than the original app.
• 8% of all paid apps in the Apple App Store were found pirated on one alternative iOS market.

A similar issue was also reported by Chillingo, publisher of The Wars is a paid-for game. What Google said on the situation that developers should use Android tools such as Proguard, which “shrinks, optimizes and obfuscates your code” and covert them in smaller executable files that are harder to alter. This clearly shows that piracy and malware attacks is becoming a big problem for the Android market as just earlier this month, more than 50 apps were found infected with malware. To cope with the situation, Google has also issued Android Market Security Tool to remove any rootkit software from infected phones.

Unfortunately, Google again got a security blow when the tool was compromised, and a fake version is making its way through third party marketplaces for Chinese users in particular.