# Android Phone: My First Malware Experience

By [Continuations](https://continuations.com) · 2016-01-08

android, malware

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My primary phone has been an Android phone for a long time. This is mostly for philosophical reasons as I highly value [general purpose computing](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=general%20purpose%20computing%20%20site:continuations.com). The ability to easily execute any code on a device that I have purchased is extremely important. Of course this comes with the potential downside that the device is harder to secure.

Last night I discovered for the first time that I had a piece of malware on my phone. It affected only Chrome and was adding links to page content, for instance taking a word such as “loan”, capitalizing it with the link going to some spammy website via an intermediate redirect site.

I was able to fix the problem relatively easily by re-installing Chrome. But in the process of debugging the problem I discovered that the software installed by LG and T-Mobile on my phone has made it basically impossible to get the phone to show up as a USB device. So I just ordered the Nexus 6P because I can get that quickly and my past experience with clean Android has been great.

There are several other phones though that I am interested in trying out. One is the [Fairphone](https://www.fairphone.com/phone/) and the other is the [OnePlus 2](https://oneplus.net/2). Both of these to me stand for the promise of what can be done with the more open ecosystem of Android.

In the meantime, I would love to hear recommendations for what I should do with my old smartphones.

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*Originally published on [Continuations](https://continuations.com/android-phone-my-first-malware-experience)*