Is the Google app malware? Huawei’s phones seems to think so

If you’re rocking a Huawei smartphone and you suddenly receive an alert informing you that the Google app on your phone is considered a security threat, you’re not alone. A post on Reddit has revealed that some Huawei smartphone owners are receiving these notifications which can be a little alarming.

According to Huawei’s software, they have marked the Google app as a “TrojanSMS-PA” virus, meaning that this malware has the potential to allow hackers inside of the user’s phone by disguising itself as a legitimate app. It is unclear why this has happened, but chances are it is an error on Huawei’s end since the official Google app is not malware.

Keep in mind that Huawei’s smartphones have not been able to officially use Google apps for the past few years due to Huawei being placed on the US Entity List. There are workarounds that allow Huawei smartphone owners to manually install Google apps on their phones, so it is possible that maybe these apps could have been infected.

But that begs the question of why is it only now being detected versus being detected earlier when these workarounds were first published? Either way, if you are experiencing this issue, it appears that clearing the cache of the Phone Manager app seems to fix the issue, so you can give that a try.

Source: 9to5Google