Sophos dangles free Android antivirus to tempt BYOD-friendly biz Sophos has crafted a freebie antivirus app dubbed Sophos Mobile Security for Android-powered devices. The software tries to protect smartphones against malware, warns fandroids of privacy-invading programs and can lock down a gadget if it's lost or stolen, ideally without taxing either performance or battery life. The software …
"In other words security is completely f****d if you use android so don't use it for anything too important."
Unless you stick a security suite on your phone, but in a test carried out by a leading computer magazine,mthey found only two products worthy of the term security product. Some freebies are utter rubbish.
So beware.
...if devices protected by this will also appear in the Sophos management console - one advantage of a company with a long-standing record in the business sector will be if BYOD can be brought into the loop. Avast, Lookout etc won't have that level of integration, which will remove the piecemeal approach if the employees' company uses Sophos. It could also be a lighter touch than full lock-in, such as may be applied to devices provided by the employer.
As soon as you get ANY power on a computing platform, in comes an anti-virus provider to take it all away. I'm now waiting for the patch-an-hour problems, followed by a move to a patch Wednesday (Tuesday y'all busy) to hide the sheer stream of updates.
Oh, no, wait. Many don't have an Android update path. Which explains the need for anti virus.
Nice and circular, no? Let the neg votes begin..
I agree.
It seems to be a case of, "Oh, the PC market seems to be set for a massive fall, so your replacement Android devices need us AV providers..." - In other words, this is the AV providers continuation of their business model, extended to mobile/tablet devices.
The problem with that approach is, of course, those updates being mobile devices will eat into 3G/4G data plan allocations, on top of the licence/upgrade charges for the AV product and the inevitable 'hit' on performance (it will go towards the way of "it needs a 4-core cpu to run just the AV!"), capacity (again, towards the way of "once AV is up and running, the user's other apps will be able to share the remaining 8Kb out of the 2Gb total installed memory") etc...
FUD
Android is not Windows so you don't get updates AV daily let alone multiple times a day and it is only necessary to update if you are about to install a new app. So there is no reason to use your data plan allowance to download the update just wait till you're on WiFi. Personally I'm on Wifi 23.5 hours of the day so I never use any of my data plan anyway.
If you read the article Sophos AV does not run all the time on Android, it only scans apps when they are installed. Avast also works like this (and has a scheduled daily scan) so I guess all Android AV probably does. Which means it is not using any of your phone's memory when you're trying to run other apps.
But of course an AC knows better eh.
A lot of hot air in this thread (all threads to be fair), and obviously none of you have bothered to try the app or look into the info on their website before posting.
1. I've been running Sophos beta on my old one-core Motorola Milestone. No performance hit detected so stop with the "needs quad core" bullshit.
2. It defaults to update via wi-fi only so stop with the eating into 3G plans bullshit.
3. You're welcome to run no AV on your devices.
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