Count your devices first, in writing
A reader opens three vendor pages side by side and tries to work out which covers the most. That comparison is built to defeat you: different vendors count a tablet as a full device or not, and a licence that covers a phone does not always mean the phone gets the desktop product. The order that works is to fix your own requirement before opening a plan.
Step one: the count
- Count physical devices, not people. A household of three with four phones and two tablets needs five or six licences, whatever the marketing says about "whole-family" plans.
- Note the operating system of each, because licence terms frequently differ between desktop and mobile, and between Android and iOS.
- Separate the work device. A phone managed by an employer may already carry company security tooling, and a consumer subscription may be the wrong answer for it.
Step two: what the operating system already covers
| Platform | What ships included | What a paid layer typically adds |
|---|---|---|
| Android | Play Protect scanning, platform-level permission model, built-in find-my-device. | Firewall control, web filtering across browsers, VPN, credential monitoring, a second scanning engine. |
| iPhone / iPad | Gatekeeper-style app vetting, Mail privacy features, built-in find-my-device. | Web filtering, VPN, credential monitoring, a password vault. A "firewall" on iOS is usually the web filter — see features explained. |
| Tablet | Same baseline as its phone class. | Same additions — but check whether the vendor counts the tablet as a full licence. |
| Desktop | Windows Defender or macOS XProtect + Gatekeeper, switched on by default. | Ransomware folder protection, a configurable firewall, cloud backup, a VPN. |
Step three: the plan that fits the count
Once the count and the baseline are written down, the plan is a filter. The per-device cost falls sharply with the multi-device licence, which is why the multi-device shape is usually the sensible one for a household — until the renewal changes the arithmetic. That is the subject of the pricing, renewal and rights page.
{CTA_BOX}The one product with a paid arrangement on this site is TotalAV Mobile. What it covers, platform by platform, is on the TotalAV Mobile overview.