Competitors, criminals, intellectual property thieves, and even individuals with an agenda or a desire for vengeance will target your mobile apps because they serve as entry points to valuable data and critical services.
But the biggest reason attackers succeed is because many businesses underinvest in mobile application security—leaving themselves exposed to breaches, data loss, customer churn, brand damage, and severe financial impact.
Attackers look for any technical and procedural weaknesses and gaps in your mobile app security. Some of the most prolific threats you can face today are:
Attackers can decompile or disassemble your mobile app to read code, extract algorithms, and replicate proprietary features. In doing so, they may also uncover secrets, hardcoded credentials, or unprotected business logic.
Once an app is broken down, attackers can modify it by adding malware, disabling security checks, or inserting code to harvest user data. In some cases, they may even repackage and redistribute the compromised app under your brand—causing serious harm to both your business and your users.
Using dynamic analysis tools and instrumented environments, attackers can alter app behavior in real time. This lets them bypass authentication or licensing checks and disable security features enforced only at runtime—leaving your app exposed even after release.
Poor encryption exposes sensitive data both in storage and transit. Attackers may access local storage, databases, and log files on the device, or intercept data through unsecured APIs and cloud endpoints.
Flaws in API authentication and validation can give attackers access to sensitive business or user data—or even allow them to disrupt critical backend systems.
Unsanitized inputs leave you open to injection attacks and privilege escalation. Attackers can manipulate systems, overwrite data, and gain unauthorized administrative access.
When you accept the risks of unsecured mobile apps, you can expose yourself to a host of real, measurable costs that span your business and your users, from top to bottom.
Attackers exploit vulnerabilities in payment authentication, in-app purchase logic, and code integrity to gain access to premium content, execute fraudulent transactions, and redirect legitimate revenue streams to their bank accounts. A successful attack creates losses and can drain your revenue at best.
These losses may appear as drops in legitimate in-app sales, increased chargebacks or refund requests, and higher costs to investigate and remedy fraud.
For example, attackers commonly use ghost-tapping tools and app clones to bypass in-app purchase checks and exploit weaknesses in mobile payment authentication. They simulate user transactions or upload modified app versions to obtain premium content and services without payment. As a result, businesses face direct, severe revenue losses from these fraudulent transactions, and consumers fall victim to fake apps that steal their personal and payment data.
Industry reports link these methods to significant, recurring losses for app publishers and end users across China, Singapore, and Southeast Asia.
Regulatory noncompliance encompasses failures to implement adequate security measures for securing data flows between your mobile users and your back-end servers.
When a breach occurs, regulators scrutinize whether you had documented risk assessments, implemented industry-standard encryption, monitored third-party integrations, and secured your mobile app against attacks. Failure at any of these steps can trigger significantly expensive financial, legal, and operational enforcement actions.
These actions often come with costly mandatory corrective measures and ongoing audits, and can also open the door to private litigation from your business partners, investors, or the users who suffered harm as a result of your inadequate mobile app security practices.
For example, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €530 million for allowing the transfer of user data from its mobile app to its back servers without adequate safeguards or risk analysis.
Breaches often force immediate, sweeping actions that go far beyond patching a single vulnerability. You may need to disable core features, halt new user onboarding, or even pull the affected app from the store entirely while investigations are underway.
The operational fallout is swift. Removing an app or limiting functionality halts new revenue and risks driving existing users to competitors. Every hour of downtime means lost transactions, missed subscription renewals, and shrinking market share.
Meanwhile, internal teams become consumed by incident response instead of innovation. What starts as a mobile app security failure can quickly spiral into strategic disruption—setting your business back while competitors continue to advance.
In July 2025, the Tea Dating Advice app suffered a catastrophic breach that exposed over 72,000 user images (including driver’s licenses) and 1.1 million private messages, impacting more than 1.6 million users. Technical analysis revealed a series of common mobile app security failings that left the platform vulnerable.
The breach forced Tea to disable its core functionality, inform its user base, and divert engineering towards incident response for months. To make matters worse for Tea, users filed 10 class action lawsuits against the business.
If you lose control of your intellectual property in a mobile app security breach, your competitors can release copycat apps, often faster and cheaper, because they bypassed your R&D costs.
As a result, you may see direct drops in sales and user numbers as your unique features or algorithms show up in rival, newer, shinier offerings. Also, your brand equity erodes as cloned apps confuse or frustrate your user base.
In 2023, hackers leaked the entire source code of the popular Android game Escalators. This mobile app security breach enabled the attackers to reverse engineer core gameplay mechanics, bypass in-app purchase logic, and produce unauthorized app clones that directly competed with Escalator.
The theft undermined the original developer’s competitive differentiation, eroded user trust, exposed sensitive backend credentials, and resulted in immediate revenue loss.
When you suffer a mobile app security breach, customers lose confidence and trust in your brand. Many will uninstall your app, post negative reviews, and discourage others from doing business with you.
If that’s not enough, you can face a full-scale public relations nightmare. News of the incident spreads rapidly across social and mainstream media, shaping your narrative in ways you cannot control.
If you mishandle the mobile app security breach, or if the breach is especially severe, you may need to invest heavily in rebranding and reputation recovery. This process takes time, distracts your senior team, and doesn’t guarantee you’ll win back the trust you lost.
While you address the fallout, your competitors move ahead with capturing even a bigger market share and the customer loyalty that you worked hard to build.
You can minimize the downfall of mobile application security disasters, or even eliminate them, but this entails considering mobile app security as an integral part of your essential risk management and business continuity.
This process starts with applying contemporary, technical, and process mobile app security best practices. How?
In the following 8 sections, we’ll explore mobile security best practices to help your DevSecOps teams harden your mobile app, secure sensitive data, and reduce the risk of breaches.
Attackers rely on reverse engineering to exploit apps, so layered code obfuscation is your first line of defense. You must employ multilayered obfuscation that goes beyond simple renaming:
Secure app packages and prevent unauthorized modifications by introducing anti-tampering protections at both launch and runtime:
Defend your app in real time by monitoring its behavior in memory to prevent active exploitations.
Strong encryption ensures that sensitive user data remains protected at rest, in transit, and throughout its lifecycle:
Building security into your software development lifecycle helps prevent avoidable vulnerabilities from slipping into production:
APIs are a common attack surface, so hardening your app-to-API communication is essential for mobile application security:
Keeping dependencies, libraries, and SDKs updated is one of the most effective ways to stay ahead of evolving threats. Set up dependency management automation to patch third-party libraries and SDKs:
Securing your mobile apps takes more than ticking a technical checklist. It demands ongoing management and coordination between your stakeholders, your developers, your security operations teams, and regulatory and compliance bodies. What’s more, your security and development policies must align with, and serve your business processes.
If not contained and consolidated, managing mobile app security can be chaotic. This is especially the case in release cycles that demand operational discipline, or during active threats when you don’t have the time or resources to implement manual processes and work across fragmented tools.
So, the best thing you can do is to invest in a mobile app security solution that can bring efficiency and structure to your workflow. You can use it to consolidate critical protections, automate repetitive tasks, and enforce your policies and standards reliably, even as your release cadence accelerates and your attack surface expands.
PreEmptive is a mobile application security platform that turns mobile app security into a repeatable, automated part of your build process. It gives you more than surface-level protection and provides mechanisms that actively frustrate attackers and limit the potential for real-world damage:
PreEmptive plugs directly into your CI/CD pipeline, so you can secure your Android mobile apps quickly without slowing down your releases.
Start your free trial now to experience how PreEmptive reduces risk and simplifies security.