How to protect your mobile app and your phone

2017 marks ten years since Apple released the iPhone, changing the landscape of technology in ways none of us could have anticipated.

Since then, the way we communicate and stay entertained has been completely revolutionised. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created around the world for designers, developers, marketers and more.

So what’s next for smartphones? There is plenty of talk about flexible screens and paper-thin models, but the focus for the short term is on security. The industry has realised how important it is that the personal information of users and the businesses they work for is protected from hackers and criminals.

Preventing devices from being stolen or hacked has become a priority, with the following initiatives coming into play over recent years:

iPhones themselves and many major banking apps now offer fingerprint security, meaning that rather they can only be opened with the fingerprint that is unique to the owner.

Bloggers have concluded that a fingerprint is more secure than a PIN, as a PIN can be guessed or figured out, while it takes a lot of work to recreate someone’s fingerprint.

To build on this, one of the exhibitors at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show displayed how it can adapt smartphones to require iris scanning and even voice recognition to prevent unauthorized use of someone’s phone. Your eyes and your voice are as unique as your fingerprints so this technology could make phones even more safe from being used by the wrong people in the near future.

Most customer focused apps don’t require a password in order to open, but business related apps can benefit from having one.

Adding a password during the development phase can be a good idea. This protects a business as well as an employee by preventing anyone from easily getting into the back end of the

company’s IT systems and accessing secure information. Requiring the password to be regularly updated is the next step to added security.

Find my iphone (or ipad or macbook) and a range of other apps don’t prevent phones from being stolen, but they do help the owners (and the police) to discover where they have ended up. This consumer-facing feature has been credited with recovering a plethora of lost equipment since being introduced.

These clever apps also let users access their information remotely in order to lock it down completely or wipe any information that they don’t want getting into the wrong hands.

As a developer or entrepreneur, it is important to consider app security throughout the development process. Adding password or fingerprint protection is helpful if an app contains information that a user does not want accessed.

It is possible to take your app security a step further, however, and add a virtual ‘mesh’ that will not only protect your users, but your app itself from being hacked and reverse engineered.

Quixxi’s unique API can be added to an app during the development to provide this protection. The clever design of this software means that even if a hacker is able to figure out how to access some of the code, they won’t automatically get right ‘in’ to the back end of the application.

Quixxi has been noted as the best mobile app security scanner by publisher Geek Flare for its ability to identify vulnerabilities within your app. To find out more visit www.quixxi.com