In a quiet revelation in a late Saturday night blog post, Google said that it is remotely disabling the malicious apps that had been uploaded to and distributed from the company’s Android Market to millions of owners of Android- based handsets.

The blog post also disclosed that no user data had been compromised by the over 50 malicious apps that had been downloaded to nearly 260,000 devices via its online store. Google also added it intends notifying the customers about the deletion of apps by late Tuesday, after their handsets had been cleaned of the malware.

Noting that the accompany is working on some other ways to keep the Android Market free of malware, Google noted in its blog post that its staffers were “adding a number of measures to help prevent additional malicious applications using similar exploits from being distributed through Android.”

Google’s recent move of remotely disabling the malicious software is perhaps the first such attempt whereby the company has reached into the already-sold handsets to eliminate dangerous apps that had been installed voluntarily by the users.

However, as per Google’s licensing terms with the manufacturers, the company has always retained with itself the mentioned ability of remote disabling of malicious apps. Last year, it had wiped the Android handsets of a security researcher’s experimental program, which, though harmless, was essentially designed to exhibit the some of the main drawbacks of the Android operating system.