Thought we'd ask folks about their experience with malware on Android devices, since you say it's such a thing. Do we win a phone or something now?
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Thought we'd ask folks about their experience with malware on Android devices, since you say it's such a thing. Do we win a phone or something now?
Reader comments
Hi, @WindowsPhone!!!
Better question is how do some people "know" that they are free from malware? The best type of malware goes undetected as I have learned through windows over the past 10 years.
If it's undetected, ad infinitum, then why would it matter to the end user if it has absolutely no real world impact on their daily life? If the malware doesn't decrease performace, share their personal details or identity with anybody who abuses it, then what the hell does it matter? You may as well call Ingress malware because it collects data and shares it about the person without them being aware of it.
What I would be worried about are the ones that copy your online banking actions such as amazon, PayPal and your checking account.
Makes me wonder how thoroughly google checks the apps before putting them in their store.
Simple: you take responsibility for your hardware and run diagnostics (Not a virus scan) on your system every few months, or when you notice it acting out of the ordinary.
That, and you don't download stupid shit.
@Androidopensource Well played, sir. Well played.
Its silly that they bother with the malware statements.
I rooted my phone and installed a custom ROM. I was shocked to find that Angry Birds was the whopping price of £0.00! Angry, I trawled many Russian sites I couldn't find until I found a .apk for Angry Birds.
After trying about 10 download links on my Windows desktop (some required me to run a .exe before I could get the file, after installing they didn't seem to work), I finally found the .apk and transferred it to my phone.
Upon installation, it asked for every kind of permission possible on Android. Naturally, I accepted - what's the worst that Rovio could do with my personal details. The game also asked for superuser permissions, so I let it have that, too.
Sadly, the game didn't work. It must not be compatible with Android 2.2. At that point I gave up. A few weeks later, I had noticed that I had received an increased amount of spam in my mailbox and lots of unsolicited calls. There were also other apps that simply appeared on my phone.
I don't know how, but I think my phone got malware. I think it was the stock Gmail app.
Is this sarcasm or what?
whopping price of £0.00!? superuser permissions? stock Gmail app?
:-) Yes, sarcasm.
It's what I suspect the thought processes of some of the people who complained about having malware are. Others wanted to win a new phone. Although there were probably one or two who did it due to a simple mistake.
No offence, but if you didn't see the sarcasm in that post then you must be a bit retarded...
Post of the day though! Haha
LOL...Hilarious :-)
A more interesting poll would be
1) I have malware but I sideload pirated Android apps
2) I have notification bar spam and I think this is malware
3) I have malware that doesn't fit into one of the above categories
4) I don't know what malware is
5) I never got malware
And that's with some people defining malware as anything that puts unwanted notifications in your notification bar, which is hardly the end of the world and is fixed by an uninstall. (Jelly Bean allows you to see which app triggered any particular notification.)
This is petty. Advertising is about taking a fact and blowing it out of proportion to suit your own interests. The same way Apple did with the, "I'm a Mac," commercials. Everyone worth their salt already knows that you don't get malware on your hardware (Windows, Android, or otherwise) if you're responsible and you don't download stupid shit. Walk on in the comfort of that fact and leave the ad guys to pander to the ignorant. It's not like Android is hurting or anything.
I read a lot of the #DroidRage responses, and there were quite a few that associated those spam text messages as malware. What happens is these idiot users think they can really get a free iPad, enter all of their personal info on a web page, and use their cell phone like it asks them to do. Next thing you know here come the text messages. That's not malware, that is plain old stupidity on behalf of the phone owner. Then they get mad when they are charged $10 to unsubscribe from those text messages. Smart Phones don't make dumb people smarter!
"Smart Phones don't make dumb people smarter!"
Best line ever! :)
3 devices with 40-70 apps on each (plenty of sideloading)
no problem yet, but I would be silly to think that they dont exist.
That was one of the more misguided ad campaigns since the "Mom, do you sometimes feel...not so fresh" douche commercials of the 80s. I had exclusively Android devices from 2010 until 2 weeks ago (dozens of them) rooted them, installed custom roms, side loaded apps occasionally, etc. I never wound up getting a piece of malware. I did finally wind up switching to a Win Phone as my primary handset, but that was a situation where it was specifically a better fit for me, not because Android is somehow garbage just because a certain percentage of the phone buying population still don't understand how to read app permissions.
No malware yet with 4 rooted devices in 3 years. But then, having been the superuser and "sideloaded" every single program on my personal computers from 1983 till 2002, and continuing to "sideload" what Ubuntu doesn't have in its repositories today -- and not being the software pirate I was in 1984 -- I'm a little bit cynical about the alleged dangers. Go use an unjailbroken iPhone if you'd trust a massive corporation more than your own judgment.
I do consider notification bar spam to be malware. On Jelly Bean, apparently, it'll just be a minor annoyance. but for the other 95% of devices in current use, including all the ones in our house, it's an action undertaken to make someone else money at my expense while concealing its source. That makes it no better than a keylogger or premium SMS sender.
Of course the commercial Android blogs are going to call it no big deal... they exist because of advertising revenue.