Every year there are more and more deployed and developed mobile apps. With the growing number of applications available on the market, the amount of software is also increasing. At the same time, there’s a reasonable chance that hackers can exploit more programs with vulnerabilities and security issues.
The digital landscape is getting more hostile regarding competition and security threats. That’s why developers need to think about security seriously and invest in this aspect of their products. You can’t jeopardize customer privacy and data in any way.
Luckily, the whole industry is keeping up with these security demands and is adopting new approaches and solutions to combat them. Here are the most significant mobile app security trends in 2023.
Use of DevSecOps
More and more companies are using DevSecOps approaches to develop reliable and secure apps. But what is DevSecOps? It’s a relatively new methodology combining DevOps practices with traditional software development and security methods for creating robust apps that cyber criminals can’t breach.
DevSecOps takes into account security from the earliest stages of development. Companies adopt security testing early on and don’t see this as an unwanted expense. At the same time, team members also include security experts with different outlooks on security overall.
At the moment, around 30% of companies use DevSecOps for development. However, this number will only increase as security becomes ad more vital point in the mobile app industry.
Growing consumer expectation
Even though the number of apps is growing, customer expectations are still increasing. Why? It’s pretty simple, actually. The more apps are competing out there, the more options customers will have.
Since developers will compete to deliver the best possible app, their quality keeps improving. At the same time, apps have reinvented themselves in the past decades. In this kind of environment, customers are used to getting something new.
These expectations also include security, as there have been significant security scandals concerning some of the most popular apps in the world. That’s why companies are responding by adopting the latest security standards, application development compliance, and DevSecOps.
Less focus on detecting jailbroken and rooted
Developers often relied on root and jailbreak detection methods to detect potential security issues within an app or trigger them. In fact, this was their go-to approach for a long time. But the whole industry quickly turns to other practices offering more robust results.
This approach has a few areas for improvement. First, individuals can use jailbroken or rooted devices for non-malicious actions. That could trigger security mechanisms like booting them or crashing the app and create a poor user experience. On the other hand, reverse engineering has made a lot of progress in creating evasive techniques to bypass root or jailbreak detection.
New privilege escalation attacks are continuing to grow. Various tools can download modded apps without rooting or jailbreaking. These reasons have made developers look for more robust alternatives in 2023.
Developers will pay more attention to app protection solutions
Mobile app security is building momentum as there’s a need for more sophisticated solutions. We can safely predict that the mobile app protection niche will increase production. Many of these solutions have claimed to handle security needs instantly.
Even though newer options allow developers to check security during development, only a few can protect you from serious scams like tampering or reverse engineering. However, this doesn’t mean that app protection software is useless.
Professionals and developers will have to check the solutions they’re choosing thoroughly. They need to see whether that software can actually do what it promises and if there are robust performance metrics against the biggest threat models.
Pro-active security is a must
Mobile apps have become a primary target for hackers and reverse engineering experts that want to exploit weaknesses on a large scale. In 2022 alone, hackers have stolen over $2 billion in cryptocurrency directly from mobile apps.
That’s just a single year and just one specific statistic regarding mobile apps. With so many threats, companies need to take their mobile apps seriously in terms of security. Organizations are applying built-in security systems that can prevent and detect threats.
At the same time, more solutions are designed to exploit weaknesses and address them before they lead to problems.
Conclusion
Security has become one of the key factors of success in app development. Companies must be proactive and invest money in security if they want customers to repay them with trust. Remember, consumers are also becoming more aware of security threats. When choosing an app or service, security is a deciding factor for users.
