K a s persky Antivirus & Security

SCORE PRICE Free; premium features £9.99 per year

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ou can download and use Kaspersky’s free security app for as long as you want, with no adverts and little in the way of pushy upsell. On the face of it, that’s an excellent deal because Kaspersky delivers great protection, scoring a near-flawless 99.9% in AV-Test’s most recent tests.

What you get, though, is a minimal experience. Malware scans must be initiated manually – even newly installed apps aren’t scanned automatically – and the only other major free feature is an anti-theft module, which includes the ability to take remote photos and to automatically be notified of the phone’s new number if the SIM is changed.

Cough up £10 for a year’s subscription – or activate the 30-day trial option that’s hidden away in the Settings menu –and the app becomes much more useful. Real-time malware detection kicks in, and you’re protected not only against dodgy websites, but also from text messages containing scams or phishing links.

There are also options to block calls and SMS messages from specific numbers, and to conceal certain contacts within your address book, so that anyone prying into your phone won’t find their details. These features aren’t guaranteed to work on platforms more recent than Android 4.4 KitKat, however; if they’re important, you might want to test them out on your own phone before paying for a licence.

While Kaspersky’s protection ratings aren’t to be sniffed at, its free app is too stripped down to recommend. The full package is stronger – but it doesn’t do much that alternatives such as McAfee don’t offer for free.

McAfee Security is a rather weird proposition: the free app gives you a strong feature set, but upgrading to an expensive premium licence adds very little of substance. Subscribers get access to telephone support and a cloud backup function for photos and other media files; that latter feature might sound useful, but it’s limited to a miserly 2GB.

The overall package is impressive. You can PIN-protect as many apps as you want, and set up secure profiles in which certain apps don’t appear. There’s web protection for Chrome, and the usual anti-theft measures that allow you to track your phone over the internet or via SMS. You can also remotely take a photo, and receive an alert if a different SIM is inserted into your phone; you can even set up a PIN that makes it impossible for a thief to uninstall McAfee without resetting the phone.

There’s also simple but smart integration with Android Wear. Not only can you set your smartwatch to warn you when your phone loses contact, you can also set up an alarm on the phone itself – to spook thieves – and automatically lock the handset.

McAfee scored an impressive 99.9% in AV-Test’s latest real-time protection test, and the same for general malware detection. It doesn’t make any sense to pay for McAfee, but it’s a great free antivirus option.

Alongside the usual malware scanning tools, Norton Security’s signature feature is its App Advisor. This tool – only available to paid-up subscribers – scans the apps on your smartphone and flags any that exhibit unwanted behaviour. That might mean leaking personal data, tracking your location, displaying ads, automatically updating themselves, or gobbling up battery power and mobile data. It’s a fine-toothed approach that goes beyond merely categorising apps as safe or unsafe.

That’s not to say that Norton won’t do that as well. Indeed, in AV-Test’s latest round of testing, Norton was one of the few packages to achieve an impeccable 100% protection score. It also integrates with Google Play, inserting risk reports into app descriptions to warn you away from dodgy wares. While free users don’t get the full App Advisor experience, you do get daily, weekly or monthly malware scans, plus all the expected anti-theft features. Similarly, while interactive web protection is for paying customers only, everyone can take advantage of Norton’s Safe Search tool, which directs you to trustworthy websites. And while Norton Security doesn’t include app-locking, it will direct you to Google Play to download Norton’s free, standalone app-locking tool.

In all, it’s hard to fault Norton Security’s credentials. The problem is the price: it costs £30 a year. That covers unlimited mobile devices, so it might make sense for a family, but most of us will find it hard to swallow.

“You can set up a PIN that makes it impossible to uninstall McAfee without resetting”