Best Free Antivirus App for Android - Comparison

ayanavish · Jun 10, 2013

Aspects to be considered when choosing a Security App for Android

After reckoning the security threats for Android, these are the aspects we consider when choosing and evaluating a security app:

Anti-malware engine: The appâ€™s ability to detect, clean and delete malicious apps and scripts. In this particular case, a homemade test was performed for this review's purposes. This test's intention was to install malicious APKs and other files gathered from the internet which may pose a threat to your Android device and might jeopardize sensitive data. As a parallel test for the real-time protection capabilities, the EICAR Antivirus Test was used.

Extra Protection: Some security apps may include a set of built-in extra protection options to prevent you from browsing to a malicious website (Secure Web Browsing), against spam or massive commercial SMS's (Spam filter) and against Potentially Unwanted Apps or PUAs (Application Protection). If one or more of these extra protection options are provided, they are evaluated individually to see how good they do their job.

Privacy Advisor: As had been noted previously, the activities of all the apps running on Android are based on permissions, which underlined the need for a strong security and privacy linkage between the user and the installed apps. If provided, the privacy advisor function must have the ability of listing all the installed applications and classify their risk based on the permissions they require to run, as some of these may be considered as a privacy and security breach.

Anti-theft: It considers the effectiveness of the offline and online tools provided to protect / locate / block / wipe and recover your device in case it gets lost or stolen

USSD Exploit Protection: USSD codes are special "dialed" legit commands that can be used to access a variety of phone functions. Sadly, some malicious sites use USSD codes to take advantage of certain devices' vulnerabilities through malicious links and QR codes. If this protection is included, we evaluate the app's ability to block this kind of attacks effectively.

Extra tools: Many apps include a set of extra tools to keep you protected. Some of them may include Call & SMS filtering, App Blocking and Contacts Back-up & Restore among others. Their performance and usefulness help to evaluate the app as a whole.

System resources: No matter how the good a security app may perform, it cannot be considered a great app if it turns out to be a RAM hog or an adware flagship. After all, we do not want to kill apps just to keep our AV working or give away our expensive mobile data traffic to ads. Previously, battery consumption rates were part of this review, however, they had to be removed due to the fragmentation of the Android OS and the vast variety of devices (each one with a different capacity and processor speed) which provide too many variables to account for and could result in inappropriate or misleading info.