Remove Those Android Adware Apps Lurking on Your Phone
If you have any of these 15 dastardly apps on your Android device, then it’s time to go digital hunting and remove them. According to Sophos , these adware apps do their best to hide on your device and inject crappy ads in everything you do – and at least one of these apps is installed on over 1.3 million devices worldwide.
These are the following applications:
- free.calls.messages
- com.a.bluescanner
- com.bb.image.editor
- com.cc.image.editor
- com.d.bluemagentascanner
- com.doo.keeping
- com.e.orangeredscanner
- com.hz.audio
- cos.mos.com comprehensive
- com.garbege.background.cutout
- com.hanroom.cutbackground
- com.jiajia.autocut.photo
- com.jiakebull.picture.background
- com.fruit.autocut.photo
If you’re more of a visual savvy, here’s a summary of what they looked like on Google Play – courtesy of Sophos – before Google removed them.
What’s most striking about these apps is the creative tricks they used to bury themselves on your device (so it’s easier for you to forget and harder to delete). For example, an app might first appear in the app drawer, and when you run the app, you get a bogus warning that it is “incompatible.” However, when you go looking for it in the app drawer again, the app icon will disappear.
These malicious apps can also use different names to refer to themselves when you try to find (and remove) them through the Settings app, not when they actually work. The name of the game is a misconception: the more they force you to work to find and remove them, the more likely you are to give up – or not be able to.
(And, yes, getting rid of this adware is as easy as uninstalling malicious apps, just like you would uninstall any app on your device. As mentioned, finding apps is a question, but uninstalling them is as easy as delete them.)
Going forward, the best way to make sure you don’t run into tricky adware like this is to make sure you’re downloading apps you’ve heard of (or that have been independently verified by others) and not any old stuff. you will find on Google Play. Also, check the app reviews on Google Play before downloading. If a lot of people report that an app is a scam or adware, you probably don’t want to host it on your device.