7 popular Android apps you should avoid installing
These days, there literally is an app for everything. Whether you want to spend hours playing games, watch a person on the other side of the world stream a local sports game, or organize every aspect of your life down to the minutiae.
The downside to this incredible level of choice is that some apps out there disguise themselves as your friend, when in fact they just want to harm you. Google’s Play Store has frequently received criticism for its less-than-robust approach to filtering unsafe content, and if you’re not careful, you could find yourself being tracked, hacked, or conned.
2. QuickPic
QuickPic used to be a friendly and easy-to-use photo gallery. It was never flashy, but clear communications and frequent updates saw it steadily grow a well-sized user base.
It was bought by Cheetah Mobile last year. The company immediately started uploading users’ data to their own servers, as evidenced by one Google Plus user who found a raft of new DNS requests that were attributable to the app.
3. ES File Explorer
The free version has been pumped full of bloatware and adware, and it endlessly nags you to download additional apps via non-disable-able notification bar pop-ups.
4. UC Browser
UC Browser is the most popular Android web browser in China and India. It claims to have a “fast mode” that’ll save you MBs of data usage thanks to compression.
Wonder why it’s bad? Tracking. Users’ search queries are sent without encryption to Yahoo India and Google, a user’s IMSI number, IMEI number, Android ID, and Wi-Fi MAC address are sent without encryption to Umeng (an Alibaba analytics tool), and users’ geolocation data (including longitude/latitude and street name) is transmitted without encryption to AMAP (an Alibaba mapping tool).
5. CLEAN it
Wonder why it's not advisable to use this app? As, most of what it advertises is detrimental to your phone. For example, clearing the cache will ultimately slow your phone down when it needs to be rebuilt, clearing your RAM only leads to more battery usage, and killing running apps does not save your battery as claimed.
6. Music Player
As the name suggests the app lets users play audio files saved on their devices. However, the app has lots of ads, but more worryingly from a user standpoint, it eats through data plans and destroys your battery. People who’ve commented on its Google Play listing claim gigabytes of data being consumed, as well as massive battery drain.
7. DU Battery Saver & Fast Charge
It's better to avoid this popular "battery-saving" app. For, the app does not have the ability to change how fast your device charges. This is also the king of adverts – it sponsors almost every ad that you see in any other app and manifests its own ads on your lock screen and notifications bar. Also, all those fancy speed graphs and cool animations? Totally fake.
8. Dolphin Web Browser
Dolphin is another ad-free, flash-supporting browser. However, one should download this at your own peril. Like UC Browser, this browser too is a tracking nightmare. Worst of all, it saves your incognito mode website visits in a file on your phone – go and check.
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