Pokemon GO has had an explosive success since it’s launch in some countries. While we’ve reported that the game doesn’t work if you’re not in either the US, Australia or New Zealand, that hasn’t stopped many from side-loading the game onto their mobiles, especially if they’re running on Android.
However, fans out there ought to take note that in their quest for early access to the game, they might be getting more than they asked for. These come in the form of malware, especially if you’ve downloaded the Android APK of the game from unknown sources. So to make sure that you’re not infected, here’s how you can check if your Pokemon GO app is legit or not.
Checking for Malware
The simple way
There are two ways to check for malware, a simple and a geek way. For most of you all, you’d most likely be more comfortable checking it the simplest way possible.
As we mentioned, it’s relatively simple. All you need to do is to check the device permissions that your smartphone has given to the installed Pokemon GO app you have. If it matches the original non-infected version of the app, then you’re safe. However, if there are a couple of additional permissions not matching up to the original app, then you’ve likely downloaded a malware-infected version of the Android APK.
First though, you’ll have to figure out how to check whatever permissions your Android device has given to the app, and it can be done as so:
1. Head over to Settings > Apps > Pokemon GO > Permissions
2. Compare the permissions on your phone with the legit permissions from the original non-infected APK
It’s as simple as that. As you can tell, the original non-infected app only needs access to your camera, contacts, location and storage, which is pretty all its need, to be honest. The infected versions, however, wants access to other data like running apps, bookmarks, audio recording, SMS access and much more, which even by any app permission standard, would be cause for suspect.
Read the next page for the Geek Way
