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Because new malicious apps keep springing up, a pre-compiled list of malicious apps is not an effective solution.ĭepending on which antivirus app you use, the amount of resources being hoarded could grow exponentially, even enough to slow down your phone. The lists that most of these so-called antivirus apps use to scan your smartphone are typically just not good enough. While this may sound useful, from a practical standpoint, it offers very little to no protection. Once any are found, they are flagged with a recommendation for uninstallation.
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They scan your phone to see if you have any of the apps on their blacklist installed. Every app that isn't from a vendor in their whitelist is simply flagged as a potentially malicious app. The conclusion was what a lot of security experts had been suspecting all along-many popular Android antivirus apps do absolutely nothing to scan apps for malicious behavior.Ī bulk of the antivirus apps simply use a whitelist to compare against the apps you have installed on your smartphone. In a 2019 report by AV comparatives, the security research firm detailed a thorough investigation on some of the most popular Android antivirus apps. Surprisingly, it's not as intricate as you might think. To understand whether or not you need an antivirus app, it's important to understand how most antivirus apps work.
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