Anti-Virus Roundup

[Guest targetbsp]

I co-incidentally wrote this for another forum yesterday - without knowing the Android market had been over-run by 50 virus infected apps downloaded by 200,000 people on the same day! So I thought I'd post it here in light of that.

News about the viruses posted by css771 in the Cm7 thread:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/03/01/th...-open-backdoor/

http://blog.mylookout.com/2011/03/security...ket-droiddream/

Note this comparison is based on the apps UI, speed and what areas of the phone it appears to scan. I can't say how effective any of these are at killing viruses because I only had the test one and they could all manage that! All of these, at a minimum, scan installed apps on demand and during app installation. If anyone has any feedback about actually stopping viruses then that would be great. :huh: Or if anyone has any feedback about any following pro-longed use of them? I only tested each one briefly.

Recommended:

Bluepoint - the only one I saw scan the OS during its on demand scan so likely to be the best for root and custom rom users. On demand also scans the sd card too. Fast scanning using online definitions.

NQ - Fast scanning of apps and SD card. Would be my choice for stock phones.

Creative Apps Antivirus - Very lightweight and fast app only scanner. Perhaps could be used as a lightweight realtime scanner after using one of the more heavyweight 2 above for an on demand scan?

OK:

Appscan - app only scanner

Lookout - app only scanner. Seemed forced to enable the lost phone tracker? Fine if you want it - annoying if you only want a virus killer

Mixed Opinion:

Dr Web - this is probably the safest option. It spent a long time looking at every file inside each apk (which are zip files). The downside of this is that it was slow. I mean I couldn't be bothered to let it finish slow! One for the paranoid atm - might turn out to be the best when we have virus catching stats for them!

Not recommended:

Risk Detector - All this wanted todo was delete my superuser app so I didn't test it further!

AVG - said it picked up a threat (which no other killer had) and wanted to remove it but wouldn't tell me what it was. To all intents and purposes it wanted to delete one of my apps, without telling me which one, as the result of what was probably a false positive. Or perhaps it wanted rid of superuser as above.

Edited March 2, 2011 by targetbsp