To try to stop these criminals, one of the best options is to install a mobile antivirus, but an analysis of the performance, usability and protection of more than a dozen of these apps carried out by AV Test has given us surprising results.
Beware of these two antiviruses for Android
If we look carefully at the results of this Android antivirus test, we’ll see that two of them are not as secure as we might think and they come in the last two positions of the 16 mobile security programs analyzed.
It is above all striking that the worst of all is Google’s own antivirus, Google Play Protect. In the tests carried out by AV Test, the pre-installed antivirus on Android fails above all in protection.
Results against malware
Each security application evaluated in the test had to demonstrate its protection against malware applications. To do so, the lab implemented two testing phases: the real-time test with more than 3,000 recent infected apps. Additionally, the lab used 2,800 file malware applications as a reference set, as they were already in circulation for up to four weeks.
Android’s default protection service performed poorly with 83.5% and 86.4% percent detection respectively, showing that databases take longer to update for best results. Among consumer security apps, 7 apps demonstrated perfect detection of all malware apps: Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, G DATA, Norton, securiON, and Trend Micro.
As for the other one that clearly fails in this analysis, Ikarusit did not achieve such disastrous results in malware, 97.4% and 99.8% respectively, but it lost points in usability by showing false alarms on occasion.
The best mobile antivirus
Among security apps for home users, the sample of apps tested in this test included AhnLab, Avast, AVG, Avira, Bitdefender, F-Secure, G DATA, Google, Ikarus, Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, Protected.net, securiON , Sophos and Trend Micro. 12 of these applications concluded the test with the maximum score of 18. Another two obtained excellent 17.5 and 17 points.
In this way, the 12 antivirus that obtained the outstanding and the two that obtained a remarkable leave the ranking as follows:
Test antivirus Android
- AhnLab: 18/18 points
- Avast: 18/18 points
- AVG: 18/18 points
- Bitdefender: 18/18 points
- G DATA: 18/18 points
- Kaspersky: 18/18 puntos
- Norton: 18/18 points
- Protected.net: 18/18 points
- security: 18/18 points
- Sophos: 18/18 points
- Trend Micro: 18/18 points
- McAfee: 17.5/18 points
- F-Secure: 17/18 points
Ikarus would be in penultimate position, as we have said before, since he only gets 15.5 points out of a possible 18, only getting a perfect grade in the performance section. The red lantern is for Google Play Protectwhich despite achieving perfect scores of 6 points in performance and usability, fails with 2/6 points in protection for the reasons mentioned above.
