Choosing the best antivirus for your Android phone

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Do I need antivirus on my phone? About five years ago that may have been a question, but with a rapid increase in the number of mobile malware attacks in recent years, it’s now more like a statement: Yes, antivirus on an Android phone is a must. The question is, how do you choose the best antivirus for Android phones?

How to choose an antivirus app for your Android phone or tablet

Nowadays, mobile security suites have a lot of features, and their functionality goes far beyond just antivirus. But still, antivirus is a very important part of each and every Internet security suite.

What makes antivirus good or bad? There are multiple parameters by which you can rank antivirus apps for Android. And quite fortunately, there are independent test labs that test security solutions and give them marks based on those parameters. Let’s first discuss what those parameters are.

Detection rate

Antivirus has to catch every threat trying to penetrate your phone, so in independent tests a good app has to have a very high detection rate, meaning that it detects and blocks as many threats in the test set as possible. For example, according to independent lab AV-TEST, Kaspersky Internet Security for Android detects 99.9% of Android malware in real time and 100% of the latest Android threats discovered in the past four weeks. Just to compare, the industry average is 98%, and that means Kaspersky Internet Security for Android has quite a decent detection rate.

False positives

Another parameter is the number of false positives, meaning how often your antivirus cries wolf when there’s actually no threat. According to the same test by AV-TEST, Kaspersky Internet Security for Android had only one false positive per 2,385 nonmalicious apps from Google Play — and none at all when facing legitimate software from third-party stores. That means it won’t bother you with false alarms.

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