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I haven't rooted my mobile phone, but an antivirus is running. Without rooting, how will the antivirus come to know about the files accessed by an application?

Normally, in Linux distributions, it can be found from /proc/"p-id"/fd, but in Android root privileges are required to access that folder, although it is not the case in normal Linux distributions. So, without rooting, how does the antivirus come to know about the files accessed by an application? Is there any other way other than accessing /proc/"p-id"/fd?

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  • 1. What version of Android are you running? 2. When you check under App > Permissions what permissions is the app using?
    – andDevW
    Aug 1, 2017 at 18:47

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It's simple - It doesn't. Antivirus on android has very limited access. It can't check what the given app is doing. It's not very useful. It may warn you if it finds something suspicious on sdcard/externalsdcard or one of your installed apps is in their database marked as bad. It can't scan the app data files, it can't scan the main system, so it's pretty pointless to use it.

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Anti-virus programs run in sandbox mode like every other application. They can access your storage. And they can also scan installed apps because apk are like zip files.

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  • They can scan external storage (/sdcard) only, not installed apps.
    – Irfan Latif
    Sep 2, 2019 at 7:07

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