25 Android Apps Put to the Security Test

by Cyber Hack June 15, 2015 0 Comments

25 Android Apps Put to the Security Test

The price you pay for the diversity and openness of Android is that the mobile operating system is more susceptible to malware compared to its less fragmented iOS rival. Sure there are plenty of great apps, but there plenty of dangerous ones, too. That's why most antivirus software providers, having already faced the massive challenge of dealing with PC malware, also provide security software designed specifically for the protecting the little green robot that lives in your phone or tablet.

Last time AV-Test evaluated 29 Android security apps, but this latest test only looked at 25. Absent apps include Comodo, Anguanjia, and F-Secure. AV-Test said it could only test the apps it received and some vendors didn't submit a review copy. With so many contenders already, AV-Test didn't feel the need to download any more from the Google Play store.

Every few months independent testing labs AV-Test releases a report on the state of Android security software. While the institute's latest findings aren't quite as optimistic as they've been in the past, they still contain plenty of good news.

Top 25

These are the apps that ultimately got put to the test: Ahnlab V3 Mobile,ALIBABA, Antiy AVL, Avast, AVG, Avira, Baidu, Bitdefender, BullGuard, ESET, G Data, Ikarus,Kaspersky, Cheetah Mobile (Clean Master and CM Security), McAfee, NSHC Droid-X, PSafe Total, Qihoo 360 AntiVirus, Quick Heal Total Security, Sophos,Symantec/Norton, Tencent Manager, Trend Micro, Trustlook, and Webroot SecureAnywhere. With Qihoo and Tencent in the mix hopefully this means they've put their recent cheating scandals behind them.

The Results

On their own, the results mostly seem pretty positive. AV-Test assigns points for protection, usability, and extras before adding them together for the total grade. 12 apps, nearly half of the list, received a perfect 13-point score. From there most scores stay in the 11.5-12.5 range with the lowest-scoring app, PSafe, still receiving a relatively okay 11.0. Granted, all it takes to earn the one point for extras is to include extras of any kind, so you'll have to do some more digging if you want a detailed comparison of feature sets. Protection and usability scores offer more nuance since apps can earn up to six points in each of those categories.

See the full results in the chart below.

What makes these results slightly disappointing, however, is just how good the results were in AV-Test's last round of Android security software testing. Nine apps saw their scores slightly decrease compared to their last showings. There were some improvements. Only two apps, AVG and Ikarus, showed false positives by inaccurately marking safe programs as dangerous. That's down from the five apps with false positives last time. However, in this test McAfee had a negative effect on battery life, a new, negative development.

Still, with eight apps blocking 100 percent of malicious apps, and the rest hovering in the high nineties, we should be grateful that the worst thing we can say about these results is that they've gone from great to a tiny bit less great.