Well firstly, you're citing a study from a company that makes antivirus software for mobile phones. They have a vested interest in trying to convince you that s

Well firstly, you're citing a study from a company that makes antivirus software for mobile phones. They have a vested interest in trying to convince you that such software is necessary. Secondly, the #1 and #2 "malware apps" in that report are parental control software, arguably not malware at all. Several more are ad click fraud related and have nearly zero security impact on the user on account of having no permissions other than internet access. I also didn't see any data in the report on how many of the handful of truly dangerous apps they listed were successful in getting the permissions needed to do any significant damage. Unlike with Windows, merely installing a malicious app on Android often isn't enough; that's the whole point of having a sandbox. Thirdly, the "50.31%" figure you're quoting is, again, skewed by the fact that this data is coming from a company that specializes in mobile anti-virus software and they don't seem to be normalizing by number of devices NetGuard Endpoint Security is installed on. (Do they even have an iOS app? The report doesn't seem to include data from iOS.)