With all the stories of hackers and viruses being heard around it is normal to be concerned about the safety of your personal data on your smartphone. The latter now really collect our whole life made up of phone numbers, passwords, emails, access codes, financial information, diaries, addresses, and so on. Losing a phone or seeing it unusable due to a virus or knowing that due to some strange bug someone can spy on our conversations can create certainly justified anxiety that would be better kept to a minimum.
Fortunately, on Android phones, we can add some applications that can effectively protect the smartphone from any type of hacker attack but also from spies, malware or other threats.
Let’s see together then the better security applications that we can try on any android phone.
Android security app
These apps are fine on any smartphone that has Android as its operating system, especially if we have a device with an outdated or never updated version of Android (Android 8.0 or lower).
Malwarebytes
The first app that we recommend you try is Malwarebytes for Android, one of the most popular applications of all, the only antivirus for Android that is worth installing.
Using this application it is possible to scan all the applications already present on the device and scan all areas of the internal memory, so as to verify that no malware or some app that steals data or spies on all our activities is installed.
dnspipe
To protect navigation on our Android smartphone we can use protective DNS by installing an app such as dnspipe, available for free.
By choosing Google’s DNS or one of the other DNS services available we will drastically improve browsing speed and, in case of access to sites full of malware or deceptive, the DNS will prevent the opening of the page, so as to avoid all the infections hidden on web pages (even unsuspected ones).
G Cloud Backup
If we are looking for a reliable and complete way to back up your entire phone, we recommend you try the G Cloud Backup app, also available for free.
The app offers a cloud space of 10 GB in which we can save any data on the phone so that we can quickly restore it in case of reset due to the presence of a virus. If we need more space to save everything we can also take advantage of the $ 4 per month subscription, so as to obtain unlimited space.
This system can be joined by the backup systems offered by Google, as seen in our guide How to backup Android.
Safe Security
Another malware scanning app that we can try on Android is Safe Security, downloadable for free.
It is probably the most effective antivirus app for Android, with real-time protection like that of the computer, which protects against all types of known and unknown malware.
Also included in this application, described in a detailed article, is a locator, a tool to protect apps with a password, an automatic cleaning system for junk files, and an unwanted call filter.
AppLock
If we want to prevent someone from accessing our personal apps, we can install the AppLock protection app.
This app provides password protection for apps that we don’t want someone to spy on when we leave our phone unattended, at home, at work or when going out to dinner with friends.
With it, therefore, we can prevent someone from reading our WhatsApp, Facebook, or photo gallery and lend the phone to someone without being afraid that they can see private things.
Other apps similar to this one can be found in the guide App to block the opening of applications on Android.
Other security apps for Android
In addition to the apps seen above, we can increase the protection of our Android smartphone by trying one of the following apps:
- Avast Mobile Security is the mobile version of one of the most popular antivirus for PC, also available for Android for phone security from viruses and data-stealing applications.
- AVG Antivirus: Another popular antivirus that provides complete protection against malware and scam messages.
- Avira Security: famous antivirus with integrated VPN, so that we can protect our connection even when we are surfing outside the home.
- Kaspersky Mobile Antivirus: another complete and fast antivirus, with a scan engine that is actually identical to the PC version (so it doesn’t let anything pass!).
- LastPass Authenticator: useful random code generator for two-factor access systems, complete with automatic backup of the codes on the Lastapass account (not essential but recommended).
- LastPass Password Manager – Great online password manager with a random generator, great for preventing too simple passwords from being stolen by hackers.
- ProtonVPN: great VPN service to prevent someone from intercepting our connections and discovering the sites we visit.
To discover other security apps we can also read our guides How to protect Android from malware is a guide to antivirus for Android.
Conclusions
By installing just 2 or 3 of the apps recommended above, we will increase the security of our Android smartphone, particularly if we no longer receive any security updates from the phone manufacturer.
For those who are really paranoid then we have seen, in another article, the app to chat and send encrypted messages so protected that even the best hacker would be unable to spy on conversations.
If instead, we want to use the integrated tools on Android, we can learn more by reading our guide to essential security options for android to activate.