EFF Teams Up With AV Comparatives to Test Android Stalkerware Detection by Major Antivirus Apps

EFF update
1 day 11 hours ago

EFF has, for many years, raised the alarm about the proliferation of stalkerware—commercially-available apps designed to be installed covertly on another person’s device and exfiltrate data from that device without their knowledge. In particular, we have urged the makers of anti-virus products for Android phones to improve their detection of stalkerware and call it out explicitly to users when it is found. In 2020  and 2021, AV Comparatives ran tests to see how well the most popular anti-virus products detected stalkerware from many different vendors. The results were mixed, with some high-scoring companies and others that had alarmingly low detection rates. Since malware detection is an endless game of cat and mouse between anti-virus companies and malware developers, we felt that the time was right to take a more up-to-date snapshot of how well the anti-virus companies are performing. We’ve teamed up with the researchers at AV Comparatives to test the most popular anti-virus products for Android to see how well they detect the most popular stalkerware products in 2025.

Here is what we found:

Stalkerware detection is still a mixed bag. Notably, Malwarebytes detected 100% of the stalkerware products we tested for. ESET, Bitdefender, McAfee, and Kaspersky detected all but one sample. This is a marked improvement over the 2021 test, which also found only one app with a 100% detection rate (G Data), but the next-best performing products had detect rates of 80-85%. Google Play Protect and Trend Micro had the lowest detection rates in the 2025 test, at 53% and 59% respectively. The poor performance of Google Play Protect is unsurprising: because it is the anti-virus solution on so many Android phones by default, some stalkerware includes specific instructions to disable detection by Google Play Protect as part of the installation process.

There are fewer stalkerware products out there. In 2020 and 2021, AV Comparatives tested 20 unique stalkerware products from different vendors. In 2025, we tested 17. We found that many stalkerware apps are essentially variations on the same underlying product and that the number of unique underlying products appears to have decreased in recent years. We cannot be certain about the cause of this decline, but we speculate that increased attention from regulators may be a factor. The popularity of small, cheap, Bluetooth-enabled physical trackers such as Apple AirTags and Tiles as an alternative method of location-tracking may also be undercutting the stalkerware market. 

We hope that these tests will help survivors of domestic abuse and others who are concerned about stalkerware on their Android devices make informed choices about their anti-virus apps. We also hope that exposing the gaps that these products have in stalkerware detection will renew interest in this problem at anti-virus companies.

You can find the full results of the test here (PDF). 

Eva Galperin

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