A method for detecting an abnormal application and a terminal are provided. The method includes: detecting a system event of a mobile terminal; reading process information if the system event is a triggering system event; determining whether a restarting process exists according to the process information; recording the number of restarting of the restarting process in a preset period; and determining that an application corresponding to the restarting process is abnormal, if the number of restarting is greater than a preset threshold. The method has a wide application scope for process detection, and may reduce energy consumption and resource occupancy while improving efficiency of abnormal application detection.