IOS software
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices Protecting your iPhone from malware
Protective iOS apps can’t check the system or other apps for malware
QI have Malwarebytes protection on my Macs, but can’t find any equivalent for my iPhone. How can I protect it from being hacked?
AAlthough there’s no shortage of products in the App Store which claim to protect against malware, none can compare with full-strength protection in macOS, because they aren’t allowed to in Apple’s security model for iOS/iPadOS.
At its heart is the requirement for all iOS apps to run in a ‘sandbox’, so they can’t check the system or other apps to look for evidence of malware, nor can they remove potential threats. Only iOS can do that.
These protections only work when the iOS device isn’t ‘jailbroken’, something which currently can only be achieved with physical access to the device, which applies to exploits like checkm8. Software firewalls such as Lockdown Apps and Guardian Firewall are available for iOS, and provide protection against apps which ‘phone home’ from within their sandbox, much like Little Snitch does on macOS. They don’t detect malware, although they can block attempts it might make to steal your information.
So long as your iOS device doesn’t fall into the hands of others who could install a jailbreak on it, and so long as Apple’s security protections continue to prove effective, you shouldn’t need additional anti-malware protection in iOS. You should take particular care in your choice of applications, though, as several have been caught stealing personal information, and only then removed from the App Store.