Possible virus in phone

[bjoerngunnarsson]

My phone seems much slower and battery works very hard. At the same time the antivirus programming warn for a virus called smsreg. However, when trying to remove smsreg, it says that removing preinstalled programs can affect other functions of the phone. First, is smsreg a virus? How can it be removed? 3) how can I proper check for virus and fix the problem? /bjorn

[fp1_wo_sw_updates]

If I remember correctly smsreg (smsreg.apk and smsREG.odex) is software that came with the phone. It’s not good software, but it shouldn’t cause the phone to become slower or drain the battery. It can be removed, but it’s a bit difficult.

[Stefan]

You can monitor your phone’s battery usage by using an app like “Better Battery Stats”. Find more information in this thread:

Wakelocks in Android (FP1(U)/rooted FP2)

Continuing the discussion. Hi everybody, as adviced in other parts of the forum, I’ve installed “BetterBatteryStats” to monitor the battery usage. Edit2: BetterBatteryStats is still available from the F-Droid Archive repository, while upstream has become unfree. Like @YtvwlD I had experienced a shorter lifetime of my (second, half a year old) battery. This is the result of only two hours: [image] My CPU also was on the maximum of 1.21 GHz almost all the time. Can somebody explain the s…

[paulakreuzer]

Assuming it’s not a bug you may want to check whether your battery is bloated.

[Stefan]

@fp1_wo_sw_updates

If I remember correctly smsreg (smsreg.apk and sms.odex) is software that came with the phone. It’s not good software, but it shouldn’t cause the phone to become slower or drain the battery. It can be removed, but it’s a bit difficult.

To make this clear: This is software which is not harmful per se. It is probably modified by the chipset producer Mediatek to work with Dual-Sim. So it might seem to your virus app a bit different than the original Android SMS app.

[fp1_wo_sw_updates]

@fp1_wo_sw_updates

smsreg.apk

I’m not sure if somebody ever took it apart (and if I understand the latest FP2 licence looking would not even be allowed). This article here is all I “know” about this apk. I also made a typo, I was talking about

/system/app/SmsReg.apk
/system/app/SmsReg.odex

above. But as said by me and by @Stefan, this software will not be the cause of your troubles. As Stefan pointed out “BBS” is the better tool to find the root cause. Virus software … often causes more problem than it fixes.