Norton Mobile Security includes several groovy features including Anti-Theft, Anti-malware, call blocking, and web protection. Norton says that its software can find your phone when you lose it, lock your phone if you think it’s stolen, and protect you from unwanted calls or texts. It sounds good in theory, but from a free Norton app, is it too good to be true? According to my testing…. yes. The first screen you see when loading the Norton Mobile Security app shows right away that half of the features advertised won’t be available unless you upgrade to the “Full Version.” The price isn’t listed until you make it through to the Google Play Store subscription page, which reveals it to be $30 annually. About the same price as other Android anti-virus suites. But let’s focus in on the free features, since the app is listed as free after all.
The app has 2 free features, Anti-Theft and an Anti-Malware scanner. After a quick look through the Anti-Theft tool, the only benefit I can find is it allows you to lock your phone via an SMS (text message). That’s all? Seriously Norton‽ Well, that’s just disappointing.
The other free feature available is the Anti-Malware scanner. Unfortunately it became obvious very quickly that the scanner doesn’t monitor the file structure of your Android phone, but rather just scans what apps you’ve installed. I don’t want to go all-out negative on Norton here, but this feature is completely useless for users who download exclusively from the Google Play market. Google thoroughly scans every app on its market, so there is no need for this type of virus scanner. Although if you download apps from another source it could be useful I suppose.
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