New Report Reveals that Most of the Android Antivirus Apps are Ineffective and Unreliable

In this day and age, security and privacy are major concerns for any user with Internet access. Most of the users are concerned that their data could be accessed by attackers in this online world. For that reason, users tend to install Antivirus applications on their smartphones.

Majority of the Android users must have also installed an antivirus application on their device. If you are one of them, a new report has revealed that they are useless.

Yes, you have read that absolutely correctly. A new report from research frim AV-Comparatives finds out that most of the antivirus applications for Android are ineffective and were unable to detect malware.

Majority of Antivirus apps for Android are Unreliable: AV-Comparatives

A research firm named AV-Comparatives carried out their research on Antivirus applications. The platform they chose was Android as it is considered a platform being less-secure than iOS.  This antivirus testing company, based out of Austria, performed their research on 250 antivirus apps available for Android.

It is interesting to know that just 80 out of the 250 applications were able to detect malware. This clearly indicates that a majority of these apps were unable to find the infected file or malware. Also, the 80 applications that detected malware were able to find only over 30 percent of the 2,000 malicious apps.

Moreover, it is also revealed that most of these apps had a high false alarm rate. False Alarm is basically a warning given to users for a possible malware which is not present.

This also goes to show why most of the antivirus apps show us frequent notifications of a possible virus time and again. Apparently, they are just false alarms.

If you are thinking that the research would have been carried out on smaller antivirus apps. Then we must tell you that most of the antivirus apps used in this testing were from big developers. A total of 138 vendors publishing their apps on the Google Play Store had their apps used in this research.

This includes major antivirus apps such as  Avast, AVG, BitDefender, Cheetah Mobile, DU Master, ESET, Falcon Security Lab, F-Secure, Google Play Protect, Malwarebytes, McAfee, Symantec, and more.

The name of Google Play Protect in this list is very interesting. Because we expect Google’s antivirus to be the most secure antivirus app available on Android, its own platform. Clearly, that is not the case and only 23 out of the 250 apps were able to detect 100% of the malware efficiently.