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Comment by craftoman | Hacker News Reader

Every antivirus app is a fraud. I stopped using them about 10 years now, I only use firewall and haven't got any problems. There's also some great firewall apps for Android that have logging and stuff, pretty useful.

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All AV ever did for me was find cracks (not virus infected cracks but simply cracks) or android rooting tools. I, too, stopped using AV around 10 years ago.

AV has its uses, but imo only for tech illiterate people who tend to download random stuff and execute it without thinking about it.

Are you aware Google acquired Virustotal in 2012?

I know people @ Google who worked on related technology, it's not all fraud and they took their jobs rather seriously.

But there is definitely some fraud going on. Virus scanners are necessarily positioned and privileged perfectly for exploitation. You definitely have to be careful with what you employ in this capacity.

That statement is not true, e.g. Virustotal Mobile isn't fraud.

Why is that from a 3rd party developer? The official app doesn't seem to exist any more: The link from https://www.virustotal.com/en/documentation/mobile-applicati... is dead.

Edit: Found this one: https://support.virustotal.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500214654...

I have never owned an android phone and honestly did not know that there were antivirus apps for the phone. That makes me glad that I never owned one. Are viruses much of a concern for android phones?

No, not really. The biggest concern is what everyone ignores. Apps that provide some kind of barely useful feature, but phones home and provides information about you, like phone number IMEI, your location etc.

This is really not Android-specific: https://top8antivirus.com/ios-antivirus-comparison/

But it's mostly a scam. Unless you really go for dodgy apps, it's all fine.

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