Google will now let any app use its malware-blocking tools

If you’ve ever wandered onto a sketchy website and gotten a big red notice from Google, that’s all thanks to Chrome’s malware-blocking technology that aims to protect you from sites with potentially harmful materials. In order to expand its safety precautions, Google has just announced the Safe Browsing API, which lets developers incorporate the safeguarding techniques into applications. The API is meant for applications that use built-in web browsers that could potentially link to some unwanted downloads.

With the safe browsing API, developers will be able to warn users before they click on links that may lead to malware-infected pages and also prevent users from posting links to known phishing pages from a website. The API also allows for automatic checking through Google’s suspected phishing and malware software pages for quicker results.

Google explains:

In addition to our constantly-updated malware and phishing data, our unwanted software data is now publicly available for developers to integrate into their own security measures. For example, any app that wants to save its users from winding up on sites that lead to deceptive software could use our API to do precisely that.

It might be awhile before we see apps support this feature, but the precautions are now available for anyone who’d like to offer its users some more protection. If you’re a developer that would like to learn more about the new API, head here for more information.