To step up safety of Play Store, Google has announced a $1,000 (£760) bounty for security researchers to hack and fix the apps as part of its Google Play Security Reward Program.

Google, through its collaboration with independent bug bounty platform, HackerOne, will enable security researchers to submit an eligible vulnerability to participating developers, who are listed in the program rules it said in a blog post,

Renu Chaudhary, android security and Rahul Mishra, program manager Google wrote: "With the ongoing success of our other reward programs, we invite developers and the research community to work together with us on proactively improving the security of some of the most popular Android apps on Google Play."

As reported by Sky News, a research by security company Check Point suggested that Google's automated system failed to detect 50 malware apps which were downloaded up to 4.2 million times before being removed.

The program for now is limited to a selected number of developers to get initial feedback.