As mobile apps remain a central part of everyone’s lives, their security will become increasingly more crucial. With more and more mobile payment systems, digital banking platforms, and identity verification methods, 2025 is expected to bring significant advancements in mobile app security.
As threats evolve and demands rise for privacy and data protection, organizations will look toward new solutions to safeguard their mobile apps and build user trust. Let’s look at some of our top predictions for mobile app security in 2025, and analyze how these anticipated changes will impact the app ecosystem and user experience.
1. Certain apps and industries will implement stricter environment integrity requirements
Historically, enforcing strict environment integrity checks — such as root detection — was met with resistance because of concerns about user experience. In addition, the link hasn’t always been clear between a rooted device and the malicious intent of a user attempting to reverse engineer or tamper with an application.
While this is generally true, the rapid growth of financial and identity-sensitive applications is starting to change the perception of environment integrity checks. Apps with high security requirements — especially those in digital banking, mobile point-of-sale (SoftPOS), and other financial services — now must ensure they run within secure environments. Financial compliance mandates, especially those outlined in PCI standards (for example, mPOC), require these apps run only on verified, secure devices to avoid potential penalties and bolster user trust.
Alongside this, the rise in apps requiring Know Your Client (KYC) processes — including those involving face verification, liveness checks, and identity verification — requires additional security to prevent fraud and unauthorized tampering. As a result, in 2025, we can expect stricter enforcement of environment integrity checks, especially in high-security applications. This comes as developers prioritize security in specific, high-risk environments where data and user trust are crucial.
2. Same malware tactics, increased app defenses
The threat of mobile malware on Android continues to rise, primarily through phishing campaigns. Phishing campaigns are well beyond the scope of individual app publishers, since they depend so heavily on individual user education — not to mention, social engineering tactics keep getting more sophisticated.
However, app publishers and developers can control how difficult it is for attackers to exploit devices or compromise user data once the malware is on the user’s device. That’s because Android malware commonly exploits Accessibility Services APIs and overlays to steal sensitive data, trick users into escalating privileges, or automate end users’ actions on the device. Fortunately, developers have improved their defenses to limit these attack paths.
As security research on this topic matures, more app creators will implement defensive policies, overlay detection, and API restrictions — effectively minimizing malware’s potential reach and protecting user data. In 2025, these defenses will only strengthen, making it even more challenging for attackers to compromise applications. Even so, attackers will continue with their social engineering tactics to manipulate and defraud users, even though they come at a much higher cost and with less significant effectiveness.
3. Adoption of configurable, policy-driven attestation models
As mobile app security needs grow in complexity and threats evolve, developers are shifting from fixed, client-side security strategies toward configurable, policy-driven attestation models. One of the reasons for having a more dynamic security model is to modify certain parameters of your security model without requiring an update to the device. This can be achieved through an over-the-air (OTA) security update. However, this opens up the app to dynamic manipulation of its security configuration, which will result in successful tampering.
In contrast, server-side attestation offers a more robust solution. Rather than interpreting the data locally and making a security decision, the decision is made remotely on the server based on the data collected over time — with the verdict opaque to the mobile application.
By implementing dynamic policy updates, developers can modify security responses to specific threats or address false positives, making the app more secure. Specifically, the security enforcement can be changed dynamically from the server without re-building your application. In addition, any unique scenarios that result in a false positive or an incompatibility can be addressed in an isolated way. And, dynamic allow-list based policies can be used for certain threat scenarios that are ever-changing (such as malware threats).
In 2025, configurable, policy-driven attestation models will offer a significant advantage for developers to resist tampering effectively. While certain client-side protections and obfuscation will remain important, more of the security enforcement can be made dynamic — with greater visibility into the threats or policy violations that have occurred in your user base.
4. Mobile security tools evolve to support non-experts
According to the Assessing Mobile Application Security report, 71% of organizations believe that their organization is facing a security skills gap. The good news? Nearly all (98%) report purchasing or considering purchasing additional protection solutions to bridge these gaps. Even so, not all mobile app security solutions are developer-friendly.
In 2025, we predict an increase in developer-friendly security tools and community resources. Security knowledge is becoming more democratized as the topic becomes prominent at developer conferences and in community forums. Resources such as the OWASP Mobile Application Security (MAS) project and the Mobile Application Security Testing Guide (MASTG) are making it easier for developers to understand and adopt security best-practices. There will be more access to trusted, credible research that clearly articulates the threats, vulnerabilities and weaknesses, along with practical solutions to educate the market on what is required.
Vendors are also reducing the technical barrier to achieving essential security standards — whether for mobile application security testing, mobile application protection, threat monitoring, or attestation. In 2025, the accessibility of these tools will continue to grow, empowering developers of all experience levels to implement critical security measures and close the gap between advanced security and user-friendly design.
Strengthening your mobile app security posture for 2025
As we predict, mobile app security will evolve significantly as developers adopt stricter environment integrity checks, strengthen defenses against malware, use dynamic attestation models, and leverage accessible security tools.
By proactively embracing these changes, developers can thoroughly protect their applications and gain valuable user trust. Applications of all types will benefit from a more secure, resilient, and user-friendly approach to mobile security. These trends signal a future where both user experience and robust security are prioritized — making mobile apps safer for everyone.
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(Source: Guardsquare blog)
