Google falsely flags Samsung apps as "harmful," tells users to remove them

arstechnica.com

26 points·nickthegreek··5 comments

I got this the other day after updating some apps via Samsung market, with Samsung Wallet. (An app I never use.)

It was a system dialog that popped up warning that the app had 'malicious behavior', iirc. And was in language more certain than your typical AV software false-positive.

Since I never use the app anyway, I uninstalled it to prevent the repeating "warnings".

What really aggravates me though is that I have Google's Play Protect turned off, yet have to reassure it everytime a non-PlayStore app gets updated or installed (via a similar system pop-up dialog) that No, I don't want to turn on Play Protect. Occurs occasionally for Samsung market apps, but almost everytime for F-droid or sideloaded apps.

So it's (Google) obviously monitoring and scanning everything installed regardless of your settings.

I just wonder if this Samsung App issue is Google pushing the envelope to more aggressive default (and non-overrideable) intrusion, or if it was unintentional.

Or maybe unintentional only in that it included Samsung official apps.

Are we sure the flagging is actually false? I never got a Samsung phone because the default install seemed to be pretty intrusive.

I wouldn't be so sure the flag is actually false.

Samsung has been getting increasingly scummy with their software. I wouldn't be surprised if they rolled some malware into one of their apps.

The Samsung app store has been known to be quite bad when it comes to malware. A simple Google search will show the troves of apps that have been found to have malware but I'm almost certain i read that one of the Samsung in-house apps had some form of malware rolled into it.

They're not wrong! LOL

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