Android’s Built-In Security Blocked 27 Million Threats in 2025 So, Do You Still Need an Antivirus?

Google Play Protect blocked 27 million malicious apps from the Play Store in 2025 alone, which raises a question the antivirus industry would rather you not ask: if your phone is already doing all of this without you lifting a finger, what exactly is a third-party antivirus app actually adding?

There was a time when not having antivirus software on your computer was considered reckless. Norton, McAfee, and Avast, these names were household words, their annual subscription renewals an accepted cost of owning a PC. The industry built a multi-billion-dollar business on a simple premise: your device is under constant threat, and you need professional help to survive it.

That era ended with the PC. On Android, the antivirus industry is trying to repeat it, and for most users, the honest answer is that it does not need to.

What Your Android Is Already Doing

Modern Android ships with a security architecture that most users have never examined because they never needed to; it works silently in the background whether they know about it or not.

Google Play Protect is the most visible layer. It scans every app at the point of installation for known threats and continues scanning after installation for behaviour that suggests an app has become malicious. It blocked 27 million new malicious apps from the Play Store in 2025. It alerts users when apps request access to sensitive data and automatically resets permissions for apps that have not been used in a while, a feature that prevents the slow accumulation of access rights that apps exploit long after users have forgotten they exist.

Below Play Protect, Android uses sandboxing to isolate each app from every other app on the device. Each application runs in its own contained environment with a secure user ID, preventing any single compromised app from accessing data belonging to another. Regular security patches close vulnerabilities before they can be exploited at scale. The permissions system requires explicit opt-in for access to contacts, location, camera, and microphone, meaning apps cannot quietly help themselves to your data without triggering a visible prompt.

Android is now adding AI to this stack. Phone call spoofing protection, designed to block scammers impersonating banks and government institutions, is in development. Live threat detection that identifies suspicious app behaviour in real time, including SMS forwarding that sends your messages to a third party, is being expanded. Google is also tightening sideloading rules, requiring ID checks for developers and introducing a 24-hour cooldown before apps installed outside the Play Store can run on certified devices.

None of this requires a subscription. None of it requires installation. It is simply there.

The Threats That Actually Get People, and Why Antivirus Cannot Stop Them

Here is the uncomfortable truth that the antivirus industry’s marketing carefully avoids: the threats that actually compromise most people’s phones and data are not the kind that antivirus software can detect or prevent.

Social engineering, scam calls, phishing text messages, fake WhatsApp messages from someone claiming to be a relative in trouble, romance scams, and fake investment platforms are psychological attacks, not technical ones. They work by convincing you to hand over your credentials or money voluntarily. No antivirus scan catches a convincing lie.

Malicious push notifications are a growing problem. Accidentally tapping Allow on a fake website’s notification prompt gives that site permission to flood your screen with fake security alerts, some of which, ironically, warn you that you have been infected with a virus and urge you to download a remedy. The remedy is the attack.

Open Wi-Fi networks at airports, hotels, and cafes create genuine interception risks for any device. An attacker on the same network can monitor unencrypted traffic, hijack web sessions, and redirect users to convincing fake versions of real websites. A VPN addresses this. Antivirus software, largely, does not.

These are the threat categories that have replaced traditional malware as the primary attack vectors against ordinary phone users and they sit entirely outside the perimeter that antivirus technology was designed to defend.

When Antivirus Actually Makes Sense

The answer is not that antivirus is universally useless on Android. It is that it is only genuinely useful in specific situations that apply to a minority of users.

Installing applications from outside the Google Play Store, you are operating outside the protective environment that Play Protect provides. Google’s enhanced sideloading restrictions are coming but are not yet in place for all devices. In this gap, an antivirus that scans sideloaded files for known malware provides a meaningful additional layer of protection that would not otherwise exist.

If you use an older Android device that no longer receives security updates, you are vulnerable to known exploits that patches would have closed. Antivirus software cannot fully replace those updates, but it can provide partial protection against vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild.

If your phone is showing signs of infection, unusual battery drain, unexpected data consumption, pop-ups appearing outside of any open app, or sluggish performance that appeared suddenly, running a scan from a reputable antivirus application is a reasonable diagnostic step.

For these users, established names including Norton and McAfee still offer legitimate protection, often bundled with additional features including VPN connectivity, malicious ad blocking, and SMS filtering that extend the value beyond the core malware scan.

What You Actually Need Instead

The most effective Android security for most users in 2026 involves three things, none of which require a paid subscription.

Keep your device updated. Security patches close the vulnerabilities that attackers exploit. An unpatched phone is a much more attractive target than a patched one, regardless of what antivirus software is installed.

Use a VPN on public Wi-Fi. When you are connected to a network you do not control, encryption is the only reliable protection against traffic interception. A reputable VPN service costs less annually than most antivirus subscriptions and addresses a threat that antivirus cannot touch.

Develop verification habits. Before clicking any link in a message, regardless of who appears to have sent it, pause long enough to ask whether you were expecting this message, whether the sender would actually send this, and whether the URL in the link matches the organization it claims to represent. These habits are free and more effective against social engineering than any software.

The Bottom Line

The antivirus industry made its name protecting Windows PCs in an era when the threat environment was dominated by malware that spread through executable files and email attachments. Android is a different operating system, built a decade later with those threats in mind, and Google has invested enormous resources in making its built-in protection effective for ordinary users. For most people, most of the time, that protection is sufficient. The threats that are not covered by Play Protect, phishing, social engineering, and open Wi-Fi interception are also not covered by antivirus. The honest conclusion is that Android antivirus apps occupy a narrower legitimate use case than their marketing suggests and that for the majority of Android users, education about the real threats is a more valuable investment than a subscription that largely duplicates protection they already have.