Abstract In recent years, the rapid increase in the number and type of Android malware has brought great challenges and pressure to malware detection systems. As a widely used method in android malware detection, static detecting has been a hot topic in academia and industry. However, in order to improve the accuracy of detection, the existing static detecting methods sacrifice the excessively high analysis complexity and time cost. Moreover, the correlation between static features leads to redundancy of a large amount of data. Therefore, this paper proposes a static detecting method of Android malware based on sensitive pattern. It uses an improved FP-growth algorithm to mine frequent combinations of sensitive permissions and API calls in malicious apps and benign apps, which avoids the generation of redundant information. In addition, this paper adopts multi-layered gradient boosting decision trees algorithm to train the detection model. And a dual similarity combination method is proposed to measure the similarity between different sensitive patterns. The experimental results show that our proposed detection method has high accuracy and great generalization ability.