This app will help you identify malware apps on your phone
Frequently, security researchers discover malware apps that have penetrated the net. They are available on the Google Play Store and installed on millions of Android devices. We’ll discuss an app that helps you identify malware apps on your phone.
Hidden malware in the Play Store
We regularly write on Androidworld about apps in the Google Play Store that contain malware. Some flood you with advertisements, while others try to access your banking apps. When such malware is discovered, lists of all the apps that distribute them appear, as with these 35 apps we wrote about recently.
Usually, the apps are referred to therein by the package name in the Play Store. The reason why the regular Play Store name is not used is because it can be easily changed by the rogue developers, and also because apps with a different name can appear in your app drawer.
Recent malware apps that we wrote about earlier, for example, take the name ‘Settings’ or ‘Sim Toolkit’ in the app drawer and that with an appropriate icon. That while, according to the Play Store description, it would be a sticker pack or a camera app. An app’s package name, on the other hand, is fixed and that makes it better suited to identify malware apps.
Package Name Viewer 2.0
But where can you discover the package name of an app on your phone. You can look it up by looking at the url of the app in the Google Play Store, only of course Google removes apps from the Play Store as soon as malware is detected. That won’t let you see the package name, but unfortunately it doesn’t mean the apps have been removed from your phone as well.
The Package Name Viewer 2.0 app can show you the package name of all your apps on your phone, whether or not they are available in the Google Play Store. So, as soon as you read an article about malware in the Play Store, you can use this app to compare the package names of the malicious apps with the apps on your phone.
Earlier we also wrote about five signs that malware is on your phone, ranging from apps crashing to your phone getting red hot. Often it is a combination of the features from this list that indicates malware. More than half of the readers on Androidworld also indicate that they use an antivirus app, even though the protection with such apps is quite limited. It is certainly beware of a false sense of security.
