Significant Ways to Increase Mobile Application Security

Nitin Nimbalkar
4 min readJul 25, 2019

Today in the current tech-driven era, the number of internet-enabled mobile devices is more than the number of humans in the world. As per the recent market surveys, more than 15 billion mobile internet devices will be in use by 2020. Along with that internet-enabled mobile devices, and the mobile app Development Company is also predicted to increase, for matching the rising consumer demand, which comes with ever-growing technologies. In fact, almost everyone has multiple mobile apps on their phones, and the number continues to climb. Therefore, mobile apps usage is not only rising. Instead, it’s dominating the mobile internet market. As per the recent report by “Flurry,” mobile applications command almost 86% of the average mobile users time in the U.S amounting to over two hours usage in a day. Besides, digital technology helps to make our lives simpler in numerous ways, and there are multiple things which we can do with smartphones, such as order different services, products, communicate with the world and pay for anything we would like to purchase. So, storing a lot of information on a tiny device which fits in your pocket is convenient, but still convenience has some risks to it because people share too much sensitive data with a wide range of services and devices. Thus, security breaches, followed by lawsuit appear here and there to cause a substantial monetary loss and undermine trust in the safety of mobile applications. So, it doesn’t matter what services your mobile application provides’ data security always comes first. However, below are the given ways of securing mobile apps:

Secure your code

Ideally, the app securing process begins simultaneously with the coding process. So, developers should ensure their code in the application right from the starting. So, unlike web apps, the security often depends upon servers, where native mobile apps are stored directly to a user’s devices. Therefore, don’t give any malicious operations a chance to hack or encrypt the source code of your app. Thus, the quality assurance should test the app during the development process to ensure that there are no security gaps or errors which may lead to data leak.

Run the Tests

Test-driven development is something which shouldn’t compromise because of an approaching deadline. So, make sure to test your mobile app at every stage to eliminate every issue that arises before it turns into a big issue which breaks the whole products. Therefore, penetrating tests can help you to discover gaps as well as weak points, to fix quickly during the development process, but it can also lead to significant issues if it is left unattended.

Secure the API

Mobile app API is one of the essential parts of mobile application development, and it is also one of the most unguarded parts of the product because every mobile app receives an API permission key before they interact or make changes on the platform they are working. So, this can help to do more for mobile app security by incorporating an API gateway. Hence, this will help to tighten the security of mobile app further.

Unintended Data Leakage

Unintended data leakage is one of the significant security issues in mobile apps, so nearly every mobile application ask a user for permission before the installation even starts. So, to never compromise the safety of your users, restrict the mobile app data resource, encrypt the mobile app data to tokenize the most sensitive data and can also make the sensitive or confidential information as hard to track as possible. Therefore, it is a good idea to place alerts to the users in a place where the sensitive data is likely to leak so that they can take the precautions.

Hire a Security Team

One of the best things which you can do to secure your mobile app is to hire a security team, so by allocating sufficient resources to security, will get a dedicated team of specialists which is taking care of the product safety for every involved party. So, that they can help you to plan all the security measures which need to be taken in the case of an error, security breach, or other similar issues.

Inform Users How to Protect Their Devices

When you do everything right on your side, but still sometimes it happens that the users pose a security threat to their information. So, you can inform your app users about the threats of a rooted device. However, you can also tell them about the mobile apps downloaded from unverified sources which can steal their personal and financial information. So, this seems obvious to a developer, but a regular smartphones users might not know it.

Implement High Level Authentication

Weak user authentication is a reason behind numerous breaches, so high-level authentication can help you to secure your mobile application better. Thus, you can encourage your users to set a strong password, which can give hints on how to store their passwords properly and warn them about common threats which might not be evident to them because as a developer, you can make a mobile app to accept only strong alphanumeric passwords and can encourage users to update their passwords periodically.

So, for wrapping up,’ above are the given ways to secure the mobile application landscape from frauds and hackers, so that it will help to reduce the risk of profile. Therefore, mobile app Development Company needs to increase its mobile application security knowledge to implement the proper framework in order to safeguard user crucial data. Hence, it is the only way to reduce the risk, which often comes with mobility because the goal is to decrease the risk while ensuring the usability for enhancing user satisfaction.

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Nitin Nimbalkar
Nitin Nimbalkar

Written by Nitin Nimbalkar

Over 17 years of experience into various IT domains, I have developed expertise in developing business strategies and management.

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