Making the Internet safer and faster: Introducing reCAPTCHA Android API

Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager

When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to
visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years,
reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to href="https://security.googleblog.com/2014/04/street-view-and-recaptcha-technology.html">street
numbers and names, then href="https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html">No
CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year.

By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue
to work to refine our protections.

reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile
devices has grown rapidly, it's important to keep the mobile applications and
data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA's tenth birthday, we're glad to announce the
first reCAPTCHA href="https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/recaptcha.html">Android
API as part of Google Play Services.

With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a
streamlined user experience on mobile. It will use our newest Invisible
reCAPTCHA technology, which runs risk analysis behind the scene and has enabled
millions of human users to pass through with zero click everyday. Now mobile
users can enjoy their apps without being interrupted, while still staying away
from spam and abuse.

reCAPTCHA Android API is included with Google href="https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/index.html">SafetyNet,
which provides services like device attestation and safe browsing to protect
mobile apps. Mobile developers can do both the device and user attestations in
the same API to mitigate security risks of their apps more efficiently. This
adds to the href="https://security.googleblog.com/2017/03/diverse-protections-for-diverse.html">diversity
of security protections on Android: href="https://blog.google/products/android/google-play-protect/">Google Play
Protect to monitor for potentially harmful applications, device encryption,
and regular security updates. Please href="https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/versions">visit our site
to learn more about how to integrate with the reCAPTCHA Android API, and keep an
eye out for our iOS library.

The journey of reCAPTCHA continues: we'll make the Internet safer and easier to
use for everyone (except bots).