Before paying for a mobile app pentest — is there an internal security checklist we can run ourselves?

Have your team do these three things first thing tomorrow: 1) Strip out all app logging; console outputs should never dump customer info or auth tokens. 2) Make sure any sensitive data copied to the clipboard gets cleared automatically. 3) Test how the app behaves on rooted or jailbroken devices.

Plug open-source SAST tools right into your build pipeline. There are free tools out there that scan your code automatically and flag hardcoded secrets or insecure storage calls in just a couple minutes. Def run those before paying an outside firm a single penny.

We made this exact mistake last year. Dropped 4,200 GBP on a pentest, and 9 out of the 12 findings were just staging keys left in the code and unencrypted local cache files. If we'd caught those beforehand, the testers could have spent that time actually stress-testing our payment flow.

Having your own checklist is a great move but never treat it as an alternative to an actual third-party pentest. Teams naturally have blind spots when reviewing their own code. Run these checks to get your money's worth out of the assessment, not to skip it entirely.

were running a hybrid stack basically a webview wrapped insdie a native shell. do these local storage and certificate checks apply the same way to hybrid setups?

be super careful about hardcoded api keys left in the repo. our team pushed a temporary staging key straight to prod once and we barely caught it in time. a quick regex search across the repo will catch most of these tbh.

Two years ago, on the first release of our delivery app, a customer fired up a proxy tool and managed to change their order total to 0 GBP. That happened because we were calculating order totals inside the mobile client and just passing that figure to the backend. Ever since that incident we operate on absolute zero trust for the mobile client.

You're taking the right approach. Pentest firms will give you boilerplate remediation advice for every finding anyway, but fixing the code still falls on you. If you work through your own checklist and hand over a hardened build, the testing hours will be spent far more effectively, and the final attestation report will be a genuine sales asset for closing enterprise deals.

i didn't know that.

Here's how it went for us. Don't hesitate to ask; those who don't ask always pay more.

I think its hard to be that definitive about mobile app security checklist. I mean your time to detect an issue directly determines its cost.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

There's a trap here, let me mention it. Hasty decisions become decisions you have to fix six months later.

When you try to change everything at once, nothing settles.

I'd appreciate it if you shared the outcome.

Thanks for posting.

The most overlooked point about mobile app security checklist is this: When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too, not just the best.

I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

Let's separate the concepts, they're getting mixed up. Most incidents start with a leaked password, not a vulnerability.

I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

Timely topic. Don't rely on a single measure; go layer by layer.

You're right.