Eset, a company specializing in cybersecurity, has discovered nine applications on the Play Store that showed misleading advertisements on the smartphone
They looked like harmless apps to turn the smartphone into a remote control, but they were not so harmless and for this reason they have been removed from the Play Store. Nine fake apps have been reported to Google in recent days by ESET, the company that develops the well-known antivirus Nod32, because once installed they filled the user’s cell phone with such invasive advertising as to make the device almost unusable.
The apps are all “remote controller” apps, i.e. apps that use the smartphone to control the TV, the air conditioner or any other device that can be controlled via a wireless connection. Their names are: Remote control for TV and home electronics, Remote control, TV remote controller, Remote for Air conditioner, TV remote controlling, Remote for television for free, Air conditioner remote control, Universal TV remote controller, Remote control for the car. They are all from the developer Tols4TV and were downloaded by at least 8 million users before being removed from Google’s official store.
Fake Android apps: what dangers for your smartphone
These are completely fake apps: none of them performed the remote control functionality promised before installation. Instead, they did something else: some ran in the background, making it difficult for the user to disable them, while others, while not loading in the background, were impossible to use once launched because they responded to any user input with a full-screen banner ad. These 9 fake apps were by no means the only ones on the Play Store to behave this way: last week another antivirus company, Trend Micro, reported 85 similar apps. In this case the two developers of the apps were Alger Games and Kodev. Google responded to the reports by deleting all of these developers’ apps from the Play Store.
With so many fake apps on Google’s official store, there has been no shortage of criticism of Big G for its lack of control over developers and individual apps. Both ESET and Trend Micro advise to be very careful about the apps you download and install on your smartphone. The two cybersecurity companies suggest reading user reviews of apps very carefully, checking the permissions required by the app before installing it, keeping the Android operating system up to date and installing a good mobile antivirus.