What do you guys think of this Android security app?

[TheRisingMyth]

@LinusTech Those who "haven't tried it" are just citing the facts, if "OK" is a standard for you to integrate a sponsor, that's opening gates to everybody... if other AVs are better, and more upfront with their policies you're giving them the disadvantage by allowing their competitor to have an edge. Go sponsor Verizon because they can sure as hell allow you to make "Phone Calls" and do what they're advertised to do... i don't mean to offend anyone at Linus Media Group, but i have full grips on your ongoing strategy, and you're going from top to rock bottom in my esteem. Make what you want of it.

[Heiser]

I just used it and it did apparently find a bunch of temporary/cache files which could be removed to free up some space as well as installing a hotfix to patch a security issue.

[Guest]

Sure. I think they should be fine and it will be nice to see more people complain in the youtube comments about you getting paid for doing your job

[Legion]

 

@LinusTech : in all fairness, if you are so unsure about a company/product that you need to ask us for advice on whether or not to take it on as a sponsor, perhaps you should be staying clear of it.

A lot of people here (myself included) will blindly rely on your opinion about tech-related stuff and know you stand behind your sponsors 100%.    If you of all people don't know if you can trust this one, we sure won't.  And it'll affect our trust in you as well.

 

I appreciate @LinusTech asking for our opinion and experiences before he gets sponsored. Considering they could be all glam with potential sponsors he might not get the same experience . I'm thinking back to HTC support and how they completely mishandled his camera until they found out he was mr techtips. However I don't think I can trust him if he gets into bed with this company. Surely there must be more potential sponsors who don't have such a shady history.

[xAcid9]

Not going to try this app since it's from the same company from the desktop 360 Internet Security. I've uninstalled countless 360 AV for the past 3 years because it slow down my clients machine. It installed itself with some famous chinaware like KuWo, PPS, PPTV and shiats. It also installed >9000 side apps itself. I think some china phone have this preinstalled. 

[jerryeight]

So far I see a lot of negativity from people who aren't trying it, and the only folks who are actually using it seem pretty pleased so far. Still evaluating though. I haven't given them a final answer at this point and still waiting to hear back on why it needs so many permissions.

Linus

Please do not sign anything with a company that is not responsive to inquiries about the processes of their program.

Also I know you and your team can find better sponsors than this company offering grayware

Been a subscriber of your content from the NCIX days, so I know that someone who works this hard would have companies with more integrity than 360 Qihoo fighting each other to sponsor you. I don't usually post in the forums hence my post count being so low, but this is an important turning point for the channel.

[Godlygamer23]

Not going to try this app since it's from the same company from the desktop 360 Internet Security. I've uninstalled countless 360 AV for the past 3 years because it slow down my clients machine. It installed itself with some famous chinaware like KuWo, PPS, PPTV and shiats. It also installed >9000 side apps itself. I think some china phone have this preinstalled.

I'm using the 360 Total Security security program and it works just fine. That being said, you mentioned Internet Security. Was it really called Internet Security and they went through a name change? There are no side apps installed on my system at all from this program. I've installed it on both my rig and my laptop that was running W10.

[Med1cated]

Has anyone tried John McAfee's stuff? After all, he is still the top security dog out there. And I use his apps on my phone. Play Store available and some are free too.

 

DCentral1

 

Chadder

 

D-Vasive

 

Try em all. 

[s3ns3]

i don`t think you should partner with them. its next to useless for android security anyway. and as you can see in this thread there are debates already

e: also as a side note to whoever uses these kind of apps with 'boost' options,just stay away from them.the apps will just restart and will use a lot more resources in the process hence useless battery drain.so just from an android to another its a big no from me

[Med1cated]

Your opinion is based on your lack of investigation. Some of those apps are very good.

[Zeals]

Well normally I'm against security apps because like Anti-Virus software I feel as though the best prevention is not being stupid, but I will try it out and see if I can notice it bogging down my phone or anything.

It does seem relatively light after the first couple of minutes, so it's no majorly slowing down my phone.

Well the malicious detection I came up one malicious message, which I expected so it can detect potentially fraudulent messages sent via WeChat/WhatsApp so that's good. No false positives as well, which I'm happy with. 

I'm not too happy with the storage cleaner wanting to clear out all my cache. It seems a bit overzealous when it comes to selecting what can be cleared, it might be a design choice, but I feel as though some people who don't fully understand what they are doing will select and wipe too many things off their device. I might try wiping all the 'junk system files' off my phone and see what will happen, personally I think I will either need to log back into everything or wait a couple of minutes as my phone rebuilds its cache. 

 

As for the RAM management, it might be useful for phones with lower levels of RAM. I might bring out one of my older phones to test this. But on an OPO with 3 GBs of RAM this makes little to no difference. On top of that as part of Android Jelly Bean and Project Butter (and onwards), Google did redo the way Android used ram, making performance a lot zippier by more aggressively utilising RAM caching to keep performance up while this app just wants to free up RAM. Right after clearing it 90% of the RAM that is cleared is immediately filled up again because of this caching process so it's usefulness is questionable. 

 

EDIT 1: Clearing RAM/Cached Processes your phone will repopulate it would actually worsen battery life because of the time and processing power the phone requires to rebuild it. 

 

EDIT 2: Did a full clear of the 'junk files' and cache and basically my phone rebuilt most of the database of caches in a couple of minutes. After the rebuild there's 80mb less compared to the original 1.2 GB, so take what you will from it. But at least you won't ruin your phone by deleting the equivalent of System32 from it as far as I can tell and that's on a phone with root access. 

 

EDIT 3:
TL:DR; 7/10, decent with some questionable choices/features.

 

Final Opinions:
Boost: The performance 'Boost' option does very little in Android versions following 4.1 Jelly Bean. If you're using it to save battery you'll probably end up doing more harm than good because your phone will immediately repopulate and utilise the unused RAM to keep the phone feeling snappy. This might be useful for people with older versions of Android 4.0 ICS or earlier, so around 14% of users. However if you never close your background apps (I know a couple of people that do this) you'll probably see a bigger benefit than someone who's like me and makes sure their phone is always running in an optimal manner by ending all processing that I don't need to use in the next hour or so. Unless you're running out of memory on your phone, I don't see this of being much use of on a modern Android device with a reasonably attentive user. 

 

Clean: Okay, so did the full clear of 'recommended' items, and all that ends up happening is that the phone immediately rebuilds the caches that were cleared. Unless there is saved user information at which point you end up losing your settings and having to reapply them again. After the full clear, the phone has to repopulate these settings and that uses a lot of processing power and battery compared to have just leaving it before. Impact on available storage is minimal because most of the data that is wiped is immediately rebuilt, but if you recently uninstall a lot of apps this might be a lot more effective. 

 

This does allow you to wipe your music and other files as well, but won't let you wipe the equivalent of System32, so it could be worse. All round, not too useful I would say unless you recently uninstalled a lot of apps recently.

 

Antivirus: No false positives were detected. It is able to detect spam messages on messengers such as WeChat/Whatsapp which is good. I'm not too sure how good the detection is because it came up with nothing. I might consider attempting to install a less than legit app to see if it detects it on my back up phone that I don't use for anything when I can. It can be useful for people that download everything and are a bit silly, but Google is doing a very good job of filtering out malicious apps. 

 

Others:

• Quick Settings: It has has other features, there's the little floating widget which is kind of like the Facebook Chatheads/Paranoid Android Float/Hover which functions similar to quick settings, there is also an option to have it in your notifications bar. Not too much of a fan of this because the ROM I am running already has these features, so I just disabled them, but I can see them being useful. I would prefer more themes because it stands out like a sore thumb right now. 
• Data Monitor: Provides a more in-depth data monitor than the default Android one by giving you minute by minute breakdowns, personally I don't need this, but to some it might be useful. 
• Privacy Lock: Quite a niche feature, I don't need it but some of you might
• Spam Filter: Worked well enough to detect the spam message, it also filters spam calls apparently. I'll need to wait until I get one of these before I get back to you, but I haven't had spam being too much of an issue on my phone.
• App Manager: Easier way to uninstall apps and manage APKs, I can sort of see this being useful
• Find My Phone: I swear this is just a reskinned Android Device Manager.

Overall: A decent application, although I have found half the features to be superfluous and wish for at least a darker skinned theme. Most of the features I can see being useful for some people, personally I don't need them any of them, but it is nice to have a lot of these features centralised in one app. I would question the effectiveness of boost of storage cleaning, but I can see how it can help people. With the minimal performance impact, I'll probably just leave it on my phone for now, but chances are I'll fully remove it later on. 

 

[s3ns3]

Clean: Okay, so did the full clear of 'recommended' items, and all that ends up happening is that the phone immediately rebuilds the caches that were cleared.

go in android settings-storage- cached data ,tap on it,yes and its cleaned. no need for an app to do that  

 

and yes the boost option does more harm than good.

[MITIBEST]

The app itself should be ok, but this is not the company I will trust and let them handle the security of my device. They have shady record, and cause a lot of dispute on Chinese and Taiwan forum.

[Legion]

So @LinusTech what is the verdict?

[kristaps552]

Cerberus is great.

I got it for free on a promo a while back.

[xAcid9]

I'm using the 360 Total Security security program and it works just fine. That being said, you mentioned Internet Security. Was it really called Internet Security and they went through a name change? There are no side apps installed on my system at all from this program. I've installed it on both my rig and my laptop that was running W10.

Yup, they currently have a few softwares in English. http://www.360safe.com

 

I guess most of those softwares is not translated to english yet. lel. You can check their main site, they have softwares for everything.

360 this 360 that 360 those 360 them..

 

http://www.360.cn

[geforceftw]

This app is on par with Facebook with the amount of permissions it wants access to.