5 Types of Apps You Should Never Install on Your Smartphone

Smartphones are powerful computers that fit into the palm of your hand. For many people, an entire life’s work of information is stored within its casing. If you want to protect that valuable data, then there are a few apps that need to be avoided.

1. Pirated

The use of infected pirated software is one of the major factors to a compromised smartphone. When users call Sydney IT support, their smartphones are usually in a dire state. A user that doesn’t want to pay for an app will download a hacked version from unknown sources. These unknown sources are not verified, and can’t be traced if something goes wrong with your phone. An app that isn’t on an official store is a ticking timebomb that can make any changes necessary to your entire smartphone system. Once it decides to go rogue, it is too late to roll back the changes without professional help.

2. (Some) Ad-Supported Games

A modern smartphone has enough processing power, space, and ram to handle whatever you throw at it. The problem starts when you install multiple ad-supported games that have ‘timers’.

These games will send a push notification to the phone when the timer runs out and they are available to play again. There are also pop-up notifications about their other games, rewards, friend messages, announcements, and more. Some of these you can opt-out of, but others you have to live with. No matter how powerful the smartphone is, installing too many ad-supported games will bring the system to a halt.

3. Bitcoin Miners

This one is a big no for any smartphone user. There is currently no reason to install a smartphone miner on your phone to mine crypto. Unfortunately, the promise of riches and passive money is hard for a lot of users to ignore. The only legitimate crypto miner for smartphones are not actual miners and instead function as a remote client to log into your mining machine. But to actually mine crypto from your phone with an app is not only dangerous but highly inefficient.

4. Torrent Clients

Although torrenting on smartphones never took off, it still manages to catch the attention of a few users. It can be convenient if you have the space but is a guaranteed way to degrade the battery at an alarming rate. Superior power save settings can’t balance out the resource hog known as a smartphone torrent manager.

5. Spyware

Curiosity or paranoia with a smartphone is an easy way to get your data stolen. One of the biggest smartphone scams of all time is tricking an emotional user into installing spyware on their partner’s phone. The software works as intended and will monitor everything that passes through the smartphone. Unfortunately, that also means that some data will forever be stored on an unknown user’s server, even after you delete it from the device. Don’t let mistrust trick you into installing an actual virus on someone else’s smartphone.

Apps Can Be Dangerous

Apps are easy to install but can cause irreparable damage to your smartphone. Play it smart when it comes to installs, and you’ll be less likely to get a nasty surprise. If you still want to be adventurous, then consider installing untested apps in a desktop virtual environment.