At a glance
Expert Rating
Benefits
- Lots of tips for adopting safe habits
- Lots of smart features
- Affordable
Disadvantages
- Anti-theft protection would have been appreciated
Our verdict
It’s not the cheapest, but for the base price you actually get an unusual amount, including a good VPN service. Excellent additional social media security is a bonus.
With McAfee Mobile Security, you get a sufficiently strong antivirus protection. In the AV-Test test, it lets a few malware attacks through, but very few, and it still beats Google Play Protect by a small margin. And there are other reasons to buy it.
There are some great tools that can help you live a safer online life. Browsing protection scans links not only on the web, but also in social and messaging services, and warns you if you’re about to visit risky sites. There’s also phishing protection that includes SMS and Wi-Fi security checks.
There is also an identity monitoring system that monitors email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, passports, bank accounts, credit cards and much more. It alerts you if any information about them has been leaked online. This is better than most similar services, which only monitor email addresses.
The premium plan I tested also gives you access to a very capable VPN service that you can turn on all the time to surf more anonymously. It has servers in about 40 countries around the world that you can choose from freely, and many of them are quite fast, if not excellent. Don’t expect to be able to use it for video streaming, although it can be done intermittently.
Interface and features
Mobile Security has a nice, airy interface with clear panels that provide quick access to the most important features. However, the individual features and panels are unnecessarily large for a compact mobile app, so it takes a lot of scrolling to access them all.
At the top is a row called Quick Actions with actions the app thinks you should take. Initially, these are things like granting the app the appropriate permissions so it can do its job.
Then you get periodic reminders to do scans and other things to protect your phone. However, it’s a bit annoying that some actions seem to pop up constantly even though I’ve recently done them and checked them off. It’s troubling that it’s rarely empty in the “to do list”.
Beware of the price
There are a few different options, but choose wisely. Two-year plans offer the best value, starting at £19.99 per year for Basic (one device), which renews at £79.99 per year.
You can then select Plus for five devices at £22.49 per year (renews at £95.99 per year) or Ultimate at £27.49, which gives you 10 devices (renews at £109.99 per year).
All the above plans are full protection plans, which allows you to use the software on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. There is a 30-day money back guarantee.
In the US, plans start at $39.99 per year for Essential and go up to $89.99 per year for Advanced (Individual) and $119.99 per year for Advanced (Family). See full details here.
You can also choose to skip the payment step altogether. You then get antivirus protection, which checks that installed apps are safe and allows you to manually scan the system. You also get two bonus features: manual Wi-Fi security check and manual scanning of leaked email addresses.
Specifications
- McAfee Mobile Security
- Android 9+
- Application Control
- Privacy Overview
- Navigation protection
- VPN
- Wi-Fi Control
- Backup
- Identity monitoring
This article was originally published in our sister publication PC för Alla and has been translated and adapted from Swedish.
Table of Contents
