Android apps have a tendency to be looked at with a great deal of suspicion, especially freemium apps that claim to be free to use with optional payment plans for premium subscriptions with the rest of the revenue being generated through ads and the like. The thing is, a lot of freemium apps tend to be rather suspicious in their activities, yet in the spite of the fact that this is the case a lot of users seem not to care and they often assume that only small scale apps that no one really downloads are the ones that cause these kinds of problems.
While it is true that smaller scale apps tend to be more likely to cause these kinds of issues, at the same time there are a number of huge apps that engage in suspicious behavior as well. Perhaps the biggest example of this is an app that you might have come across or potentially even used if you tend to edit videos on your phone on a regular basis. This app is VivaVideo, and it is shocking to see just how legitimate this app appears at first.
For starters, it has over 100 million downloads and countless users have apparently given it a rating of 4.4. That’s pretty amazing when you consider that very few apps with this many downloads have managed to acquire a rating this high, but it’s also a sign that the people that created this app have gone to a lot of trouble to mask the kinds of suspicious acts the app engages in on a regular basis.
As for what the app actually does, according Secure-D, a mobile security platform, about 20 million bogus premium subscriptions have been blocked from this app by their algorithms since 2019. That’s a lot of attempts to steal money from users, and it has allowed users to save up to $27 million so far. However, it is important to note that this app has only just been discovered to be so unscrupulous, which means that countless millions have probably already been stolen from users without their knowledge.
While Secure-D has not been able to find any such issues with newer versions of the app, the fact that the app developer was brazen enough to do this and get away with it for so long is not a very good sign.
Read next: Research Shows Google Play Store Is The Main Source of Malware On Millions of Android Phones
While it is true that smaller scale apps tend to be more likely to cause these kinds of issues, at the same time there are a number of huge apps that engage in suspicious behavior as well. Perhaps the biggest example of this is an app that you might have come across or potentially even used if you tend to edit videos on your phone on a regular basis. This app is VivaVideo, and it is shocking to see just how legitimate this app appears at first.
For starters, it has over 100 million downloads and countless users have apparently given it a rating of 4.4. That’s pretty amazing when you consider that very few apps with this many downloads have managed to acquire a rating this high, but it’s also a sign that the people that created this app have gone to a lot of trouble to mask the kinds of suspicious acts the app engages in on a regular basis.
As for what the app actually does, according Secure-D, a mobile security platform, about 20 million bogus premium subscriptions have been blocked from this app by their algorithms since 2019. That’s a lot of attempts to steal money from users, and it has allowed users to save up to $27 million so far. However, it is important to note that this app has only just been discovered to be so unscrupulous, which means that countless millions have probably already been stolen from users without their knowledge.
While Secure-D has not been able to find any such issues with newer versions of the app, the fact that the app developer was brazen enough to do this and get away with it for so long is not a very good sign.
Read next: Research Shows Google Play Store Is The Main Source of Malware On Millions of Android Phones
