Quoted By:
Anti-virus is mostly hokum, but this is especially true on Android
Android has a lot of built in protections to protect you from malware. For example, Google and phone manufacturers don't really want you getting apps from outside of the playstore so they can either profit from you or so they don't have to replace people's phones when they install malware, so most phones default to be unable to install unknown apps. Once you disable things like that, the only real vulnerabilities (to malware, anyway) are from apps themselves, rather than the phone OS. So as long as you get these apps (as apks, generally) from reliable sources (xda, github, etc.), you don't run much risk, and an anti-virus certainly won't do much other than quarantine a file that it knows to be dangerous (or more likely, doesn't know and just assumes), preventing you from installing it. Now there's not really any harm in that, you might think to yourself, but this "protection" doesn't come free either. Not only will it eat up battery, system resources, and possibly data, it is also probably collecting your personal information and tracking you, and could possibly introduce it's own vulnerabilities. You are 100% of the time better off without mobile anti-virus.
As for cleaners, these aren't inherently snake oil like AV. What they do is generally clean app caches. This is something you can do with the android system itself, so you don't need it. The only cleaner I would even consider using is SD Maid. It's only really a convenience though, it just detects files and folders from apps that you've uninstalled and deletes them for you. If you see a file like com.235n2lnrekj2kj32hnw.extension, you might be hesitant to delete it because you don't know what it is, but SD Maid can tell if it's critical for an app you have or not.
But really, you don't need any of that. Mobile browsers are still vulnerable to sketchy shit, though, so consider one with an adblocker