mobile phones and antivirus

Put Norton on mine after the bank account was hacked, was advise to by Barclays to make sure there wasn’t anything left monitoring the phone

Stick avg on, free, hardly any difference in speed, job done

Wings on my sleeve said:

Is the phones in built security enough or is it necessary to use an antivirus like avast , avg , or similar?

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No need - 'built in' is perfectly adequate

Keep the phone’s operating system up to date and there should not be an issue. Certainly with Apple who are still updating my iPhone8 with security and even operating system updates even though it is in its seventh year of use.

The operating systems on phones are pretty good these days so long as you keep them updated. I'm not saying phones can't get viruses or malware but it's a lot less likely than Windows based devices.

Each app on the phone in most cases works as a container of its own with the user having no ability to modify it. The communication is usually via a secure method and unles you use a browser like Chrome or FIrefox or Safari, you are pretty safe. Also in my view iOS (Apple) devices have less of spyware compared to Android (Samsung/ Google) etc. If you limit yourself to well known apps, antivirus in phones is usually an overkill, provided the device is kept updated to the lates OS updates/ patches. Also worth getting an ad-blocker on the phone which does limit a lot of unwanted traffic as its a common way by which malicious content gets loaded onto your phone via websites that may have had their ad platforms compromised.