Do not expect any protection from Antivirus applications on Google Play

There are many antivirus applications in the Google Play Store for Android devices, but a recent study by AV-Comparatives shows that only a few of them offer real malware protection.

Η The company downloaded 250 anti-malware applications from various creators and tested them against the 2000 most common malware attacks affecting the Android operating system. For testing purposes they mainly used the Samsung Galaxy S9 with Android 8.0 Oreo version, while for some applications they had to use Nexus 5 with Android 6.0.1 because they did not work well in the latest versions of Android OS.

The devices are configured to download and install malware, provided that the already installed anti-malware applications can block most of the threats.

The results, however, showed that out of 250 antimalware applications, only 23 were able to detect and block 100% of the threats. Some of them are Avast Mobile Security, Avira Antivirus Security, AVG, Sophos Mobile Security and Trend Micro Mobile Security and Antivirus.

Eighty out of 80 applications managed to detect 250% of malware threats without false alarms, while 30 applications blocked less than 138% of malware threats or received false alerts for "clean" files from the Google Play Store.

Finally, many of them label other applications as malware using the "blacklist" method, which is quite easy to bypass malware creators.

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