Can your computer become infected with a virus by data from your moblie phone?

I think that most people who have a smart phone are enjoying the power that it gives them when they are mobile. Just a few years ago, if you wanted to do some of the things that you can now do on a smart phone then you would have to drag a laptop around with you. With the new smart phones that are on the market, that is no longer the case. The devices are like mini computers. But some people wonder if that can have a negative effect as well. Are the fact that the phone are like mini computers lead to them infecting the normal computers that you have in the household? We will take a look at it and see if there is anything that you have to worry about. 

Do you have to worry?

The short answer is No; you do not have to worry about a virus infecting both your smart phone and your computer. The two devices run on different kind of hardware and making software that could affect both would be very hard. You would have to target both platforms. And the software would have to have a custom compiler that compiled into both platforms as well. Most phones CPU’s are based on the ARM model while most computers are based on the intel x86 model. When you are creating a program to use on a smart phone on your computer, you have to run an emulator to see how it works. The program will not run natively on the machine. A virus is nothing more than a piece of bad software program so if a normal program cannot run on the machine then a virus can’t either. 
 
A more extensive answer is that even though a piece of malware cannot run on both machines, it does not mean that your computer cannot pick one up from the phone. Most smart phones are able to hold data in a storage area. This data can be transferred to both a computer and other smart phones. For example, an MP3 or an Excel spreadsheet is data that is usually shared between the two. While a compiled program cannot run on both machines, the data can be shared. So if you transfer a file that has a virus that was made for a computer onto your system, then there is a chance that you will become infected. 
 

Scan your data

This is why you should scan all of the data that you get from your smart phone before you run it on your computer. You never know what can be hiding on the files. Just like you would scan new data from an email or some that was downloaded from the internet, you must do the same for data that is on your smart phone.