Ok but what is Chomp SMS and Sleipnir rom? Is it true that these phones can get viruses? Someone said they can't and someone else said they can. If they can what is a good free anti-virus I can use? I was recently downloading different games to try and I was getting alot of pop ups so I uninstalled them. I'm not sure if this is my problem?
Now this is more in my ballpark:
Android is a distribution of Linux, which is based on UNIX. iMacOS is also based on UNIX. The UNIX base is inherently secure, and it's rare that it gets any viruses because of this (sadly, that's used as a marketing point for all Apple products, though it's not a feature they added so much as it is already a feature by default because of what it is based on). Android phones, as such, can't really get viruses. While it's possible, with anything, to get a virus, the chances are basically nill - a hacker would have to try
really hard to give your phone a virus, and they would have to tailor it to the specific device (since not just the Android versions, but also the phones themselves, have different security holes [if any]), and the specific Android version you're on. Since there are also ROMs and modifications to the source code, even some phones ending up on newer versions of Android than what they came out of the box with - it's a ~0.00001% chance your phone is going to get a virus.
However, there is one large caveat to this: malicious apps. A malicious app can get root permissions if you allow access to it, and it can then wreak havoc on your device. But that's if you allow the root permissions, of course. The, IIRC only, exception to this is if an app exploits a security hole in the device that will allow it to wreak havoc as a root user without you having to grant it root permissions. In the case of this device, giantpune said that if an app exploited the security hole in the backlight driver, this could be done.
You also mentioned anti-virus apps. The gist is this: all of them, no matter which company they came from, are bunk. Since, IIRC according to giantpune, they can't actually open up individual .apks to scan each one for malicious code, they operate off of blacklists only to determine if you've installed a malicious app or not. This means that, since the Play Store is always on a whitelist, if you opened up the Play Store .apk, inserted some phone-breaking malicious code into it, and repacked it, the anti-virus app wouldn't catch that and would say you're good to go. However, the anti-theft feature of many anti-virus apps, is, in fact, awesome. For that, I do recommend either Lookout, Avast!, or Kaspersky. As for the pop ups, those sounds like either ads or push notifications, neither of which are a virus and both of which are annoying - shame on the developer who gave you push notifications. There are much better ways of getting money than annoying the crap out of his users.
