Adware apps on Android are nothing new. A new report from Trend Micro identified 85 adware apps that were a bit more complex and advanced than your typical adware.
These apps, most of which were masquerading as photo editing applications or games, employed a bunch of clever methods to display annoying ads to users, while also making it extremely difficult for the user to uninstall them.
Trend Micro’s research into these apps showed that the apps first checked if a specified amount of time had passed since the user first installed them, this was set to a default value of 30 minutes. Once the time had passed, the app would hide its app icon from the app drawer, and create a shortcut on the device’s home screen. This would prevent users from actually uninstalling the app by dragging the icon and uninstalling it. Here’s the list of the apps:
- 361 Camera
- Background Changer
- Background Eraser
- Beautiful House
- Beauty Camera
- Blur Camera
- Blur Master
- Blur Photo Editor
- Charm Camera
- Checkers box
- Cherry Camera
- Color House
- Connect Smash
- Connect Together
- Cos Camera
- Date Stamp Camera
- Draw 1 Line
- Easy Camera
- Easy Camera Pro
- Face Camera
- Fancy Camera
- Fashion Camera
- Fast Blur
- Find Differences
- HD Video Player
- Hi Music PLay
- Jelly Crush
- Magic Camera
- Meet Camera
- Mirth Cam
- One Line Stroke
- One Stroke Drawing
- One Stroke Line Puzzle
- One Touch Draw
- one-line draw puzzle stroke
- Owl Camera
- Panda Camera
- Perfect Camera
- Photo Background Eraser
- PIC Eraser
- Pixel Blur
- Pop Camera
- QR Code Scanner
- Quick Blur
- Seals Camera
- Selfie Artifact
- Selfie Camera
- Selfie Dog
- Smart File Manager
- Stylish Camera
- Super Camera
- super Selfie
- Super Selfiecam
- Sweet Camera
- Sweet Selfie
- Toy Blast
- Toy Smash
- Toy Story
- Video Cut
How to remove the apps
Google has already removed these apps from the Playstore so if you haven’t downloaded any of the apps there’s no reason to be afraid.
But for those who already downloaded the apps, you can uninstall the malicious app. And if that doesn’t help, use adware clean up software–and if all of this doesn’t work, you can do a factory reset. Read this article on how you can remove adware apps.
