Skip to main content

Stop Separating Mobile App Security from Performance

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

There's an image problem with mobile app security. While it's critical for highly regulated industries like financial services, it is often overlooked in others. This usually comes down to development priorities, which typically fall into three categories: user experience, app performance, and app security. When dealing with finite resources such as time, shifting priorities, and team skill sets, engineering teams often have to prioritize one over the others. Usually, security is the odd man out.

Image
Guardsquare

 

Mobile app security's undeserved reputation as a secondary concern stems from several factors. For one, it has a stigma of being difficult to implement. After all, mobile developers specialize in building fast, reliable applications, while security engineering is an entirely separate discipline requiring specialized expertise. This "security skills gap" makes mobile app security inaccessible for many development teams. It also presents additional challenges when scaling mobile app development.

As an app scales, mobile development teams introduce greater complexity and functionality. This often happens through the popular and accessible scaling method of adding third-party SDK libraries. But more risk is being introduced to the application by importing these libraries. While these libraries help accelerate development, they also introduce risk, making mobile app protection even more critical.

At this point, mobile app security can no longer be ignored. A DIY approach may seem like a viable option, as it allows teams to tailor security measures to their needs without inflating app size. Open-source tools exist to help optimize the size of the app, but they require experienced security engineers to implement sufficient protections. Developers without security expertise will have difficulty implementing effective protections, leaving the scalability problem unresolved. This means teams are still forced to compromise between performance, security, and UX.

Weaving in multiple layers of code-hardening and obfuscation techniques at the code level provides the robust protection that DIY solutions cannot.

So, what's the best approach?

The answer is to stop thinking about security and performance as separate concerns.

Security and Mobile App Development Should Go Hand in Hand

A winning mobile app security strategy integrates security throughout the development lifecycle. Security must be a consideration at every stage — from writing the code to testing its effectiveness to monitoring threats in real time post-release.

When building your application, efficiency is key to a timely release. But it is also critical to write efficient, secure code. For example, Android apps need to optimize their Java code and resources. Secure coding practices inherently improve efficiency. Removing logging code, eliminating dead code, and code shrinking are examples of a few efficient coding practices that also increase mobile application security. Merging classes and method inlining are other secure coding practices that help shrink the overall size of a mobile application. Mobile apps can apply this to resources in the code as well. Resource shrinking and obfuscation will reduce application size and improve security.

These techniques not only have the potential to reduce application size but also enhance security. With the proper tools, mobile apps can shrink in size by as much as 70% and increase speed by 20%. Incorporating these practices will create an efficient, high performing application that is well protected against malicious threats.

Post-Release - Continuous Threat Monitoring

After publishing your app, continuous threat monitoring will provide ongoing insights and protection by identifying threats to your app in real-time. Security teams monitoring your mobile application receive metadata like app builds, device type, and geographic location with each threat, along with details about each detected threat. Sharing this data with security and development teams gives them the data they need to build proactive protections against new and evolving threats, while helping to mitigate future risks.

Developers and security experts are both essential to building and executing this strategy together. By embedding security into the development process, you can create a high-performing, secure, and scalable app without compromise.

Stop compromising between app performance, user experience, and security. Deliver a superior user experience and a high performing application by incorporating security into your development process. 

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Stop Separating Mobile App Security from Performance

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

There's an image problem with mobile app security. While it's critical for highly regulated industries like financial services, it is often overlooked in others. This usually comes down to development priorities, which typically fall into three categories: user experience, app performance, and app security. When dealing with finite resources such as time, shifting priorities, and team skill sets, engineering teams often have to prioritize one over the others. Usually, security is the odd man out.

Image
Guardsquare

 

Mobile app security's undeserved reputation as a secondary concern stems from several factors. For one, it has a stigma of being difficult to implement. After all, mobile developers specialize in building fast, reliable applications, while security engineering is an entirely separate discipline requiring specialized expertise. This "security skills gap" makes mobile app security inaccessible for many development teams. It also presents additional challenges when scaling mobile app development.

As an app scales, mobile development teams introduce greater complexity and functionality. This often happens through the popular and accessible scaling method of adding third-party SDK libraries. But more risk is being introduced to the application by importing these libraries. While these libraries help accelerate development, they also introduce risk, making mobile app protection even more critical.

At this point, mobile app security can no longer be ignored. A DIY approach may seem like a viable option, as it allows teams to tailor security measures to their needs without inflating app size. Open-source tools exist to help optimize the size of the app, but they require experienced security engineers to implement sufficient protections. Developers without security expertise will have difficulty implementing effective protections, leaving the scalability problem unresolved. This means teams are still forced to compromise between performance, security, and UX.

Weaving in multiple layers of code-hardening and obfuscation techniques at the code level provides the robust protection that DIY solutions cannot.

So, what's the best approach?

The answer is to stop thinking about security and performance as separate concerns.

Security and Mobile App Development Should Go Hand in Hand

A winning mobile app security strategy integrates security throughout the development lifecycle. Security must be a consideration at every stage — from writing the code to testing its effectiveness to monitoring threats in real time post-release.

When building your application, efficiency is key to a timely release. But it is also critical to write efficient, secure code. For example, Android apps need to optimize their Java code and resources. Secure coding practices inherently improve efficiency. Removing logging code, eliminating dead code, and code shrinking are examples of a few efficient coding practices that also increase mobile application security. Merging classes and method inlining are other secure coding practices that help shrink the overall size of a mobile application. Mobile apps can apply this to resources in the code as well. Resource shrinking and obfuscation will reduce application size and improve security.

These techniques not only have the potential to reduce application size but also enhance security. With the proper tools, mobile apps can shrink in size by as much as 70% and increase speed by 20%. Incorporating these practices will create an efficient, high performing application that is well protected against malicious threats.

Post-Release - Continuous Threat Monitoring

After publishing your app, continuous threat monitoring will provide ongoing insights and protection by identifying threats to your app in real-time. Security teams monitoring your mobile application receive metadata like app builds, device type, and geographic location with each threat, along with details about each detected threat. Sharing this data with security and development teams gives them the data they need to build proactive protections against new and evolving threats, while helping to mitigate future risks.

Developers and security experts are both essential to building and executing this strategy together. By embedding security into the development process, you can create a high-performing, secure, and scalable app without compromise.

Stop compromising between app performance, user experience, and security. Deliver a superior user experience and a high performing application by incorporating security into your development process. 

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...