<strong>Mobile apps give greater financial transactional freedom</strong>

In Asia, consumers are more sophisticated about mobile threats and mobile app security. This translates to more specific and demanding expectations and a growing appetite for advanced protections, including protection from malware, trojans, hacking, and fraud.

What is Appdome’s approach to combining mobile app security and fraud prevention?

One of the most interesting facts that we learned from the Global Consumer Expectations of Mobile App Security survey is that consumers don't differentiate between mobile app security and fraud prevention. In fact, 70.4% of consumers demand mobile app protections which go beyond the login screen and data protection, and include anti-fraud and anti-malware protection built into the mobile app. In addition, 62% of consumers demand both the best features and security in their mobile experiences, equally. And on top of that, approximately 24% say protection against on-device security, fraud and malware threats and attacks is more important than features.

On Appdome, Indian banking, FinTech, retail, travel, mhealth and mobile game brands can achieve their desired outcome of mobile app security, mobile fraud prevention and mobile malware prevention instantly, directly inside their DevOps workflows. No coding, No SDK required.

What are your plans for India? The opportunities and challenges?

India and South Asia are the fastest growing digital economies in the world. In fact, 80% of all online traffic in India is coming from mobile and 5% of all global app downloads are coming from India. Revenue coming from mobile apps is expected to grow to US$4.8b in 2027, up from US$2.7b in 2022.

Consumers globally are depending on mobile apps to give them greater financial transactional freedom. Appdome’s Global Consumer Expectations on Mobile App Security survey clearly showed that consumers demand more protection in their mobile app experiences. And while brands have invested heavily in automating building and releasing new versions of their apps, mobile app security today is not automated and as a result takes a back seat to new features. The voice of the consumer that emerged from the survey is very clear: Consumers value security as high as new features.

Appdome is the only cyber defense automation platform that connects to the DevOps systems used by app makers and make it fast and easy to build security into mobile apps, directly in their CI/CD Pipeline.

Appdome has seen increasing interest from Indian banks, fintech, and other brands building super apps with transaction functionality. This is the reason why we're investing in South Asia.

Why should mobile security be a priority for DevSecOps?

With Appdome Cyber and Dev teams can easily shift left in security. DevOps teams have invested heavily in automating the build and release process of their mobile apps with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, Bitrise, Github, Gitlab and more. One of the most interesting things we hear from developers is that they don't want to build any security, if it cannot be seamlessly integrated into their existing DevOps workflows. Developers are all about Rapid and Agile releases. Anything that causes a disruption to their existing automation processes is a red flag. The Cyber and Dev teams we talk to are very clear, for cyber teams to be relevant in the DevSecOps world, they need to adopt developer best practices to building mobile app security. And that means, triggering a security build with a simple API call inside their existing workflow. This will allow the Cyber teams to quickly version their security model to react to the ever-changing threat landscape. The bad guys are using automation to attack mobile apps, they only way brands can stay ahead of the bad guys is to use automation to build mobile app security directly in the DevOps workflows and plug Appdome into their CI/CD pipeline.

Can you share some names from the industry who have successfully implemented Appdome’s solutions? How have they benefited from it?

Security is all about protecting your assets and not telling the world how you are protecting them. I think you can understand why our customers prefer to keep the bad guys guessing.

What is Appdome's product focus and how are you deploying new-age technologies to your products and solutions?

Appdome’s mission is to bring automation to the job of protecting mobile apps globally. Our flagship no-code cyber defense automation platform enables mobile dev and cyber security teams to implement their choice of 150+ mobile app security, anti-fraud, anti-malware, and anti-cheat features into any Android and iOS app directly from inside the CI/CD pipeline that developers use to build, test, and release mobile applications with rapid pace and high velocity. In addition, Appdome offers an agent-less mobile XDR solution called ThreatScope that delivers real-time visibility into all threats and attacks against iOS and Android apps in production. ThreatScope leverages the same no-code delivery system, which allows developers to add telemetry, threat detection, defense and response to mobile apps in seconds, without coding and leveraging the same automated toolset they use to rapidly build and deliver apps.  

Can you talk about the latest developments that companies need to pay attention to right now?

What stood out in the Global Consumer Expectations on Mobile App Security survey was that in Asia, consumers are more sophisticated about mobile threats and mobile app security. This translates to more specific and demanding expectations and a growing appetite for advanced protections, including protection from malware, trojans, hacking, and fraud. It’s not enough to protect source code and data or pass a pen test for compliance. South Asian consumers believe security and malware protections are basic requirements for all mobile apps. And like global consumers, they hold brands accountable, ranking the threat of a developer releasing unprotected apps as high as malware, fraud, and other serious threats. In fact, over 25% of Asian consumers ranked “a developer that doesn’t care about my security” as a top threat.

What was most interesting was the over 70% mobile consumers said they would either ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ abandon an app that did not protect them. The data reveals that Asian customers are extremely savvy when it comes to understanding the mobile threat landscape, and they demand the highest forms of protection from the brands they trust and use the most.  The good news is that brands who do focus on security can expect mobile users to reward them via brand advocacy in overwhelmingly high numbers (over 95% across all forms of advocacy).

By Aanchal Ghatak