How to tell if your phone has a virus

Hopefully you’ll find out that your phone has a virus because you’ll notice that it has performance issues rather than because you’ll check your credit record and discover that someone has been taking out loans in your name.  These performance issues can be anything from general slowness and poor battery life to what might seem like odd glitches for example your phone making unexpected calls and/or texts, using up a lot of data or connecting to WiFi when it shouldn't.

If your phone just has general performance issues, then you might want to give it a general clean-up and tune-up before you start worrying about viruses, you might also want to try investing in a new battery as these can wear out long before the phone itself does.  If that works, then you probably didn’t have a virus, but downloading a good antivirus app would be a sensible precaution. If that doesn’t work, then there’s a good chance that you have picked up a virus and here’s what to do about it.

Try downloading an antivirus and having it scan and treat your phone

There’s no harm in trying the easiest option first, just remember that you’re going to need a bit of luck on your side for it to work.  These days virus-creators are becoming increasingly astute about preventing their victims from downloading and/or installing antivirus apps, but it could still work so give it a go.  Just make sure that you download your antivirus from a reputable source, otherwise you could end up installing another virus and making the situation even worse!

Clean up your browser(s)

Similar comments apply here.  Cellphone viruses are becoming more sophisticated but a lot of them are still fairly simple and just operate through your browser.  This means that if you clean up your internet cache(s), you stand a fairly good chance of getting rid of the virus. Remember that you need to do this for all browsers you use.

Clean up your file downloads

If that doesn’t get you anywhere, there is one more option to try before you get into more painful solutions and that is to go into your file downloads (not your apps, the files) and clean them up.  This isn’t (currently) as useful in the cellphone world as it is with regular computers but it can help.

Do a full factory reset or try cleaning up your apps

The question of which option to pick as your less-bad choice will depend on how you have set up your phone.

Doing a full factory reset

If you’re the kind of person who only keeps a few, key apps on their phone and most of your data is safely in the cloud, then you might find it easiest just to do a full factory reset and start again.  If you’ve picked up a virus which stops you from going into your menu to start the factory-reset process then you will probably find you can force your phone to do it through the physical controls, check the internet for details of how to do it on your phone.

Cleaning up your apps

If, by contrast, you’re the sort of person who likes to keep a lot of apps on your phone and you’ve maybe fine-tuned your settings so that they’re just the way you like them, then it might be worth your while to go into your apps and try and find the one which is causing the problem.  It’s probably one of your more recent installs, and maybe one you don’t actually recognize or remember installing. Just be aware that this can take a lot of time and still wind up in you having to do a factory reset as some viruses will stop themselves from being uninstalled.

Stop the problem from happening again

Hopefully, you will have managed to get rid of your phone virus without too much pain or damage, but you won’t want it happening again.  The good news is, you can head to this page right now and get all the protection you need at a great price!

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