[SOLVED] Does 3 antiviruses affect phone performance?

Andrew223344

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Apr 7, 2019
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I have SM J5 17, i have 3 antiviruses on it: McAfee(default), Bitdefender, Avast. I have installed 2 antiviruses with other apps without knowing . Does 3 antiviruses affect phone performance? I know on pc, if you have 2 antiviruses, they affect a lot your performance. I dont know if they affect phone performance too. Thanks.
 
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Even on desktops, you do not need an antivirus. After i uninstalled my antivirus recently, i noticed the boot up time of my PC got 5 seconds faster.

Sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

An additional 5 seconds of speed at boot time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit!

Anyone who would run a PC in contact with cyberspace without an antivirus is making a very bad and ill-informed decision. Though antivirus is less necessary on smartphones, the need for it is increasing, not decreasing, and there are scads of products with a light footprint that virtually never send the user messages unless a compromise is encountered.

Bad advice cannot and should not go unchallenged.

With regard to the PC world, Quietman7, a security expert who is...

sdedu77

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Dec 9, 2018
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Depends if they offer real-time protection or not. If so, they will run in background and consume more resources and power. For a powerful processor, it won't be a speed issue, it will be for the battery. Anyway, you don't need more than a single antivirus, neither real-time protection if you only visit secure websites and download apps from Google Play. I'd be more concerned about the networks you connect at. You are more vulnerable using wifi in a cafe than in your home. Just scan from time to time to be sure your device is virus-free.
 

AleksiDj52

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Mar 4, 2017
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I have SM J5 17, i have 3 antiviruses on it: McAfee(default), Bitdefender, Avast. I have installed 2 antiviruses with other apps without knowing . Does 3 antiviruses affect phone performance? I know on pc, if you have 2 antiviruses, they affect a lot your performance. I dont know if they affect phone performance too. Thanks.
Yes it does actually affect your phones perfomance quite a lot, why do you need 3 antiviruses? there is no need to have 3 antiviruses installed, choose the one you like the most and delete the other ones
 

Sagar_20

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Doesn't matter it's harmful or not, you should not install any antivirus on a phone.

They would rather degrade your phone's performance and constantly send you notifications to fix problems that does not even exist.

There is a popular android app called CM Security with a rating of 4.7 from 25+ M users.

It just killed my phone.

Even on desktops, you do not need an antivirus. After i uninstalled my antivirus recently, i noticed the boot up time of my PC got 5 seconds faster.
 

britechguy

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Jul 2, 2019
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Even on desktops, you do not need an antivirus. After i uninstalled my antivirus recently, i noticed the boot up time of my PC got 5 seconds faster.

Sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

An additional 5 seconds of speed at boot time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit!

Anyone who would run a PC in contact with cyberspace without an antivirus is making a very bad and ill-informed decision. Though antivirus is less necessary on smartphones, the need for it is increasing, not decreasing, and there are scads of products with a light footprint that virtually never send the user messages unless a compromise is encountered.

Bad advice cannot and should not go unchallenged.

With regard to the PC world, Quietman7, a security expert who is an active contributor on Bleeping Computer, has written extensively on what you (any you) need to do to develop safe interaction habits with cyberspace. The following four are, in my opinion, must-reads:
The principles are the same for any device that interacts with cyberspace, though the details are not.
 
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Solution
Aug 1, 2019
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multiple antivirus is not better as they interfere with each other and it will effect your phone performance. I suggest you to buy one antivirus for your phone that work well and full fill all your need.
 

britechguy

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I don't know anything about make and model of smartphone you're using, and whether you've larded it up with scads of apps that run in the background, etc.

Most Android antivirus is very lightweight in comparison to what is running on a PC because the nature of the threats are different.

If you have a low end phone and have put on scads of apps that can and do run in the background (and you can disable those that you don't need from doing that) it can cause it to grind to a crawl in short order.

It's highly doubtful that the antivirus is at fault. I've used Lookout on multiple devices, from low end to Samsung flagships, and it has never caused an issue.
 
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britechguy

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Well, you need to check the app permissions on all the apps on your phone.

I cannot tell you exactly how to do that, as it varies slightly among Android "flavors."

But on mine I can control whether an app autostarts when the phone boots and whether it's allowed to run in the background once I close it. I make certain that nothing autostarts except stuff I want like my email app, messaging app, the phone app itself and my antivirus, and then also make sure that anything I don't need other than when I'm actually using it is not permitted to run in the background at all.

The tendency under Android is to allow virtually everything to run in the background, which can eat up an awful lot of system resources for stuff you are not using at the moment and that takes less than a second to fire up when you want it.
 

Sagar_20

Distinguished
I can tell from personal experience there is really no benefit of antivirus on a phone.

If one knows what they are doing, safety is guaranteed.

It's hard to trust 3rd party apps now a days.

They just want to send you false notifications and trick you into thinking that they've cleaned this and that, while in reality they do nothing but take up resources and slow down everything.

Not to mention, the annoying ads they throw at you.

I even uninstalled the antivirus from my pc after it's license expired recently, considering that the windows defender also works just fine.

I had a horrible experience with an app called "Security master" where it made my phone freeze whenever i ran a scan and that day i decided not to use any app like that in life.

That is actually one of the top downloaded apps on play store, with more no of downloads than PUBG.

Below is what an article from android central says:

"Google's security services for Android are designed to provide the best security for mobile devices -- by default and free for all Android users. As a result, data about the Android ecosystem has shown that Android users face very low risk from potentially harmful applications and other threats. Users can, of course, use any solution they would like, either in addition to or as a replacement for the Google solution, but our goal is to make that purely a matter of choice, not a matter of protection. "
 
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