The increasing number of applications in the PlayStore makes Android smartphone users an attractive target too for cyber-criminals. According to Statista (2021), Android has become the most employed platform in the world with approximately 1999.12 million users worldwide. Millions of apps are supported on these devices.

Android smartphones are among the most sought-after handheld devices around the world. Google Play was originally launched in October 2008 ( Threatpost, 2020). The remarkable result i.e., almost 100% best detection rate is observed for the seven out of 10 tools when analyzed using the individual obfuscation techniques, four out of 10 tools on category-wise obfuscation, and not a single anti-malware tool attained full detection ( i.e., 100%) for inter-category obfuscations. Obfuscation techniques significantly impact the detection rate of any anti-malware tool. The evaluation results show that the inter-category-wise hybridized code obfuscation results in more evasion as compared to the individual or simple hybridized code obfuscations (using multiple and similar code obfuscations) which most of the existing related work employed for the evaluation. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of anti-malware tools to gauge the impact of complex hybrid code-obfuscations techniques on malware detection capabilities of the prominent anti-malware tools. However, in most of the related works, the obfuscation techniques used for analysis are either based on individual or a combination of primitive obfuscation techniques. Several studies have suggested that the obfuscation techniques may be more effective when used in a mixed pattern. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the impact of the different obfuscation techniques, both when they are used in isolation and when they are combined as hybrid techniques.

Some attackers use the obfuscation techniques in isolation, while some attackers use a mixed approach ( i.e., employing multiple obfuscation techniques simultaneously). The obfuscation techniques are used to hide the malicious code in the Android applications to evade detection by anti-malware tools. With the increasing use of Android, malware developers have become active in circumventing security measures by using various obfuscation techniques.

The Android mobile platform is the most popular and dominates the cell phone market.

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