Android Security tips: Armour-plate your smartphone
The tools you need to protect your phone or tablet from virus, theft and loss
3. Install Anti-Virus
There are a number of anti-virus tools for Android at the moment – Avast, AVG, Lookout and Norton are all available for free and provide a range of features to protect your phone. According to Avast’s Miloš Korenko, only 30% of Android users have security software installed. He also explained the prevalence of free anti-virus apps, noting that “there’s close to no money in Android [security applications]”, making Avast’s presence on the market (as well as that of its rivals) largely a gesture in goodwill-making PR for the company’s paid-for desktop products. Paid-for Android security products are available, but they’re mostly aimed at corporate users and even then most of their features are available in free equivalents.
[IMG ID=”169819″]Avast Anti-Virusfor Android[/IMG]
Avast Anti-Virus for Android
4. Backups
While we were mildly peeved by losing access to mobile email, text, internet and GPS mapping services for a few days, we’re actually much more distressed by the loss of the photos we’ve not yet got round to uploading anywhere.
A mobile backup service can be critical when it comes to retaining such data. Some online backup services, including SOS Online Backup support Android backups. The free version gives you 5GB of free storage and makes it easy to back up your photos, videos, audio files and more whenever you’re connected to the internet via Wi-Fi.
[IMG ID=”169813″]SOS Android Backup[/IMG]
SOS Android Backup
5. Take advantage of Google’s services
Google provides a massive range of services, all of which link together and most of which safely store your data in Google’s cloud. This means you can use Google+ for Android to automatically upload every photo you take to a private G+ gallery (so even the embarrassing ones are kept safe from prying eyes until you choose to go public with them), Google Drive to upload any file from your phone to the net and sync it with other devices on which you’ve installed Drive and use Gmail to sync and save your phone contacts online. Thanks to a combination of these features, we were able to quickly and easily retrieve the most critical data from our lost Android device.