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. "