Online Sense is ICDL Arabia's philanthropic arm aimed at raising public awareness on Cyber Safety.

Did you know that the Google Play store is filled with scam apps? While this may or may not be surprising to you, it’s actually quite possible that you might have one or several of these apps installed on your device.

You will be surprised to know that these scam apps are actually some of the most popular apps on Google Play. Some of these are ‘battery savers’, ‘phone performance boosters’, and even anti-virus apps!

Let’s first take a look at the so-called ‘battery-saver’ apps. Most of these apps actually do not save battery charge, as they claim. They actually gave you an impression that they are saving the charge on your battery.

Many of the battery-saver apps show you a cool-looking animation that almost convinces you that the app is working in the background. These animations show how much of the battery time the app is ‘saving’.

Still lagging behind in project delivery? Change things now with ICDL’s trusted Project Planning certificate.

This test clearly shows that ‘battery saver’ apps don’t actually work.

Much like the ‘battery-saver’ apps are ‘booster apps’ that claim to enhance the performance of your phone (make it work faster). Most these ‘booster apps’ are actually pretty much alike. They claim to improve your phone’s performance by closing apps running in the background and making more free space in your phone RAM.

Before falling for these ‘performance booster’ apps, it’s important you understand that your Android device is already doing this for you, without any app!

Instead of making your phone more efficient, these booster apps actually affect your phone’s performance. Here’s how – when you try to open apps such as YouTube, it takes much longer to open if you have a ‘booster app’ installed on your phone.

This is because the app has closed the YouTube app in the background. What you are trying to say here is, trust your android device to do it for you smartly, instead of installing an app just to arbitrarily close any app that might not be actually hurting your phone’s performance.

Next on our list are anti-virus apps that, well, claim to clean your phone of viruses. But you should know that such apps aren’t actually necessary, as your Android device has built-in security measures. These security measures just get stronger, and equipped to handle new virus threats, with every update.

Even if most of these apps are free, and you might feel like you have nothing to lose, the fact is, they actually compromise the performance of your phone and occupy valuable storage space. The developers of these apps earn money by flashing advertisements on your phone.