On a smartphone huawei, downloading APKs is often necessary. But does this practice raise a security issue?
Following US sanctions against it, Huawei had to give up pre-installing the Google Play Store on its smartphones and was forced to deepen its own application ecosystem. But the latter can still put off users, both from a practical and security point of view.
APKs take over from App Gallery
With Harmony OS, the unified system of Huawei devices, we can download applications from the official store, the App Gallery. But this one is very incomplete and it still lacks many very popular applications such as Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Waze, Microsoft Teams, Duolingo, Fitbit…
If the app you are looking for is not available on the App Gallery, Petal Search, the manufacturer’s in-house search engine, takes over and offers alternatives for downloading the targeted application by other means, and in particular through their APK files.
As a priority, the user is referred to an official source to obtain the famous APK, often on the publisher’s site. When this solution does not exist, Petal Search then recommends third-party APK stores such as APKPure, APKMonk, AppParks or Uptodown.
Huawei does not skimp on security
Asked by Digital Trends, Jaime Gonzalo, head of the Huawei Mobile Services division in Europe, explains that the sites to which users are redirected all have a certain illegitimacy. They are all referenced by search engines and must be officially registered with an organization in Europe or the United States.
There are several systems in place to ensure that an APK source is trustworthy. ” We review site and app popularity to assess credibility, and make sure the page has the latest version of the app available, as it usually contains the latest security patches. At the end of the process, we perform an internal check for malware “says Jaime Gonzalo
He adds that during the download, the integrity of the application is checked so that it does not decompile or install another APK in parallel. Malware and virus protection then come into play to make sure the app doesn’t do anything unexpected, like trying to gain unauthorized access. If the artificial intelligence detects a problem, the installation will be automatically suspended.
Huawei considers the security risk to be low by installing an APK file. Of the 830 million apps downloaded through Petal Search, half came not from the App Gallery, but from an APK. Of course, the danger is always present. If you read Clubic diligently, you are aware that even Play Store applications are regularly pinned for hosting malware of all kinds.
Android is an open ecosystem, a fact that many smartphone owners running Google’s operating system may forget. Also, alternatives to the PlayStore exist, allowing in particular to react to the abuse of a dominant position by the Mountain View firm. Obviously, they are not encouraged by Google, which continues to praise the security of its application store.
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Source : Digital Trends
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