The Three Best Antivirus And Anti-Theft Apps For Your Mobiles

The Three Best Anti-Virus And Anti-Theft Apps For Your Mobiles

In this article I will review three of the best apps available in the market for safeguarding your data when your mobile gets stolen or misplaced. I will try to present the features of these apps in simple easy language so that it is clear even to people who are not very tech-savvy. I am reviewing only the Android version of these apps as I personally use an Android phone. I will first discuss AVG antivirus as I have been using the PRO version of AVG for a long time.

AVG Antivirus Pro Version

Though you do get a free version, the PRO version of AVG is a lot more advanced and comes at a price. I have subscribed to the PRO version at a yearly rate. Here is the image of what your home screen looks like as soon as you open the app.

 

Review:
The AVG anti-virus allows you to schedule a regular scan at any time of the day. I have scheduled mine in the early morning. The BOOST RAM functionality kills open tasks and boosts the Random-Access Memory of the phone. As you can see the CLEAN JUNK icon is red in colour and that means there are junk files in my phone at the moment. Tapping the Icon is supposed to clean all the junk files in your phone.

If you tap on this icon, first of all the app figures tries to identify junk files that can be safely deleted. After this step is complete you are given certain options. Here is an image of the screen you see after a CLEAN JUNK operation. 

You get options to do a Safe Clean or a Deep Clean. If you want to do a safe clean you can go ahead and do it straight away. But for a deep clean, you need to install the AVG cleaner. But to tell the truth, I do not really trust the CLEAN JUNK facility of AVG. Very often I have used safe clean, only to find some of my most coveted images missing from the photo gallery.

Coming to removing viruses, I have found AVG pretty fast. If you ever happen to visit a site with Malware, AVG warns you immediately and gives you the option to resolve the threat at once or ignore it for the time being. As far as anti-theft is concerned there are several features. Here is the screen.

You can set up anti-theft on your AVG app. There are certain options available to you. You can set up a functionality which operates such that whenever someone tries to access your phone by using trial and error repeatedly, AVG will clean all sensitive data and delete the apps. For example, you have options to set things up in such a way that whenever someone tries to log in through the home screen 10 times and fails, AVG smells a rat and deletes all sensitive data. Of course, you must provide AVG permission to do this. This is very important because you may have apps developed by your bank left in the logged in state for convenience.

Another feature provided by anti-theft is you can log into the AVG site and find out your phone’s geographical location. There are also other options available to you. You can set AVG up to lock the phone when someone tries to replace the Sim.

Another important feature is app locking. You can set up locks for individual apps. This means that if someone steals your phone, he/she will not be able to open apps that are locked.

AVAST Antivirus App

Review: As soon as I opened the AVAST App, I began wondering whether Avast and AVG are one and the same! Then I figured out that they are actually apps developed by competing companies. Here is the screen shot of the first screen you will see when you open AVAST.

Looks like a replica of AVG doesn’t it? I tried a scan and I am giving below a set of screens. You are seeing the ads because these screen shots are from the free version of AVAST, unlike AVG for which I have used images from the paid version. I got a bit of a rude shock because AVAST immediately told me that it had discovered a threat in my mobile.

On examining things further, this is what I found. Here is the screenshot.

The advanced web shield was off and that was listed as a risk. I switched it on. Here are the screens. 

I followed the procedure described and switched the shield on after which AVAST told me there was no threat discovered in my mobile. Then I did a CLEAN JUNK.

Here is the result.

And this time there was no option to safe clean perhaps because there was nothing that could be cleaned safely! I was only given the option to deep clean for which I had to install the Avast Cleaner. I guess when you CLEAN JUNK the idea is to make sure which files can be deleted confidently, and if there are any, the apps give a person
the option to SAFE CLEAN. I am afraid I do not find this very dependable. I checked the top menu for AVAST, and I found everything listed in AVG is also present in AVAST.

Another difference I just noticed is that I find a message on my mobile constantly reminding me that AVAST is shielding my mobile. I am not able to get rid of the message. Actually, AVG also watches everything all the time but the app does not advertise the fact.

Prey Anti-Thief:

Going by the very name of the app one can glean that it devotes all its energy to locating stolen devices. The very purpose of the app seems to be anti-theft. Here is the opening screen which tells you what the app is meant for. 

This application asks for a lot of permissions regarding what to do when your phone is lost. I guess one does feel intimidated when you give an app so many permissions but then just think how much Google knows about us! So, I guess using this app is a safe bet. 

Another added feature of this app is that you can make use of it for locating a lost mobile, tablet or even a laptop. All this, through one app. While the other two apps I discussed were meant for just mobiles this one is different. So, the safety margin increases. Of course, in all three apps we are putting ourselves at the mercy of the app and giving all kinds of permissions, but that is the price one has to pay for protection in these days of advanced hacking. If you have other software for antivirus and are looking for just anti-theft you can use this app.

The pricing is much lesser as it is probably meant for anti-theft alone. I hope this article gave you an insight into the apps that are available to you when you feel worried about your phone’s safety. But all said and done the best cure is to make sure that you practice good digital policies yourself. This includes stuff like strong passwords and host of other things. I will not go into that here as that is a topic for another article.