Your Phone May Not Need Antivirus Software

In recent months Antivirus software did not recognize and contain some huge malware attacks. This has caused it to take a beating in the media.

Antivirus Not Necessary on Smartphones?

There has also been a realization recently that individuals who do the majority of their computing via smartphone probably don’t need Antivirus software. A lot of people check their emails, social media accounts, and surf the web using their smartphones. If the antivirus industry doesn’t build software that is useful to these people, they are passing up on a valuable market.

Smartphones vs. PCs

First, modern smartphones operate in a different way than traditional PCs and laptops. On a smartphone, each app is provided with its own work environment and is not able to access the data found in other apps. This is really a nice security upgrade from the world of PCs and laptops. Malware that is just installed onto a smartphone will be able to do little harm. So there’s the first strike against standard antivirus software: there’s not as much need for it on a smartphone.

Secondly, due to the way smartphones work, antivirus software won’t be able to do much to combat any malware smartphone users pick up. That’s because antivirus software can’t scan multiple apps to look for trouble.

Smartphone Antivirus Programs

Although there are many reasons why current antivirus software is not very effective for smartphones, it doesn’t stop companies from offering it. One example of this is VirusBarrier. This program can be bought in Apple’s App Store. The funny thing about this is that it can’t really scan anything on a smartphone. Instead users must send email attachments to VirusBarrier from within their mail program for it to function. So, you can see, that there is very little reason for consumers to spend their money on antivirus software for their smartphones. Companies must come out with more complex software that can scan all of the smartphone systems for antivirus software to be relevant.

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