While many people believe that an antivirus app is nowadays as essential on mobile devices as on desktops in the past, a new report has claimed that a large number of antivirus and anti-malware apps on Android are just ineffective or unreliable. The report, which has been published by Austrian antivirus testing company AV-Comparatives, highlights that of 250 antivirus apps surveyed, only 80 were found to detect over 30 percent of the 2,000 malicious apps threw at them during individual tests. However, most of them were also had relatively high false alarm rates.
According to the detailed report[1], the team at AV-Comparatives chose 138 vendors that are offering popular antivirus apps on Google Play[2]. The list of vendors includes most popular names, such as Avast[3], AVG[4], BitDefender[5], Cheetah Mobile[6], DU Master, ESET, Falcon Security Lab, F-Secure, Google Play Protect[7], MalwareBytes, McAfee[8], Symantec[9], and VSAR among others.
Instead of using an emulator, as pointed out[10] by ZDNet, the researchers manually tested each of the 250 apps they've selected for the study. They essentially installed the apps on an Android[11] device and then automated the process to open a browser and download a malicious app to install it on the device. The process was followed 2,000 times, and it helped to highlight the outcome that most of the apps aren't effective to detect virus or malware.
Having said that, the testing by AV-Comparatives found that some of the available antivirus apps were able to block malicious apps. But there were many apps that were capable of detecting on some old Android malware samples and...