Phone Spyware - How to detect/remove

Been noticing a new pattern of phone harrassment recently. Once I pick up my phone and open an app I get a suspicious call. I’m pretty good at not clicking on links from unknown sources and deleting text from unknown sources. Still I may have opened one accidently in the recent past while deleting it or marking it as spam.

I’m using a Galaxy Note 8 from Verizon and have the latest updates installed. What is the latest bestest way to detect and remove malware/spyware/assholeware from an Android phone?

Ugh!!

Here’s one site that seems reasonable (it mentions Malwarebytes which has a decent reputation).

Have you installed any software from any third party sites? If so, that’s a likely source of the problem; you will probably need to uninstall that. Ads are another source, and the occasional infected app shows up on the Google Play store as well, though I don’t know how common that is.

Do you have any third party launchers? I used to use Go Launcher and really enjoyed it, but its behavior became more and more annoying so I didn’t install it on my current phone. Malwarebytes occasionally flagged some of the Go Launcher themes as risky, as well, though I think those were false positives.

Good luck!!