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Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

I've moved away from the Android ecosystem long ago, so I don't know if this is still maintained, but there's the Addons Detector app[1] which can be used to locate adware applications.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?hl=en&id=com.denp...

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There are loads of tools available to fix Android phones. The problem is that most people just use whatever is setup preinstalled. It would be a fun experiment for someone to document and post here: Buy the cheapest most bloated phone you can find and then: 1. Run the universal android debloater found on Github to disable all the crap. 2. Install some apps such as InviZible Pro to firewall the apps.

Just search the Play store for “antivirus” and install all of them.

/s that’s probably the problem with an unsafe OS by default.

>that’s probably the problem with an unsafe OS by default.

Considering how absolutely dreadful iOS has been when it comes to CVEs allowing arbitrary code executions with kernel level privileges, I don't really think anyone gets to talk about iOS being "secure" by default. Secure for your grandfather maybe. There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too [0], which is quite telling of the amount of them they already have in stock. See also Pegasus, which literally had multiple no-interaction RCEs for iPhones through iMessage (because Apple keeps parsing files through horribly vulnerable parsers). [1]

Apple gets to pretend that iOS is secure because they control the app store, which is the only official point of entry, and iOS is closed source.

[0] https://zerodium.com/program.html

[1] https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...

> There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too [0], which is quite telling of the amount of them they already have in stock.

You could be right, but I don't think it's a given that the latter follows the former. The reason that Zerodium values iOS zero-days less than Androids is more likely because the US and European governments that purchase these exploits from Zerodium value iOS less than Android, which itself could be attributed to there simply being more Android phones used by adversarial countries than iOS.

Nope. Case in point, Pegasus was used to attack the French Minister of Armies on her iPhone. Hard to attack someone more valuable than that. Zerodium doesn't blow zero days on showing ads to you, they are used for nation-state level attacks.

> There's a reason Zerodium values iOS zero days less than Android ones too

iirc it was the other way around for some time

This is a joke, right?

Many of these so called "antiviruses" are malware themselves.

In case you really don't know, the "/s" stands for "the preceding text was meant sarcastically".

I’m pretty sure it stands for “I was being sarcastic but my sarcasm wasn’t funny enough to read as sarcasm”.

It's a reddit thing which is why it doesn't land here on HN as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

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