Hello Appdome community!
We’re constantly innovating at Appdome. This Dev Sec Blog covers some recent updates to the Appdome product, including the introduction of new features and enhancements I’m excited to share with you.
Automation has dramatically improved and forever altered several industries, including coding and manufacturing process. The use of robotics increased manufacturing productivity. In the same way, automation and the use of Appdome’s no-code mobile security platform has completely changed how mobile developers secure mobile apps. With automation, Appdome makes secure mobile app development faster, more efficient and, most importantly, more complete.
Appdome now secures millions of mobile end users. Developers and security teams alike have suggested that we are quickly becoming the standard for secure mobile app development. To this end, allow me to share these exciting new developments.
Introducing Appdome’s Certified Secure™
At Appdome, we believe that every Appdome customer deserves the trust and confidence in the security implementation completed on our product. That’s why we’re proud to announce the newest addition to our service line up, called Appdome’s Certified Secure™.
Certified Secure is designed to give organizations the written record that apps secured by Appdome have the security and threat prevention features needed in each app. This simplifies compliance and sets Appdome even further apart from competitors and SDK-based products that rely on others for each implementation. Because Appdome is the only product that can complete security implementations automatically, Certified Secure is a one-of-a-kind service for all Appdome customers.
With Certified Secure, organizational administrators, security and other teams have the assurance and written record of which security feature has been added to each app, build by build, using the Appdome product. Users receive the Certified Secure verification each and every time they build an app on Appdome. The same users can access and download the Certified Secure certificate and share it with management, security and dev teams. Each certificate shows the build detail, including the name, version and BuildID of the target application, the Appdome product user that created the build, date as well as a detailed description of the security features implemented to that app.
We would love your feedback on Certified Secure. If you want to upgrade to Certified Secure, please reach out to the Appdome support team.
Introducing Appdome-DEV PLUS
Appdome-DEV customers are the largest and most successful customers in the Appdome family. With Appdome-DEV, customers gain access to our Build-to-Publish APIs, CI/CD integration, enhanced support and other benefits. Earlier this year, Appdome announced an upgraded service called Appdome-DEV PLUS which provides the industry’s first globally distributed infrastructure for automatically building security features into mobile apps at scale. Appdome DEV-PLUS has the capacity to handle 10,000s of simultaneous security builds per minute, complete with critical infrastructure security and uptime guarantees.
To support our Appdome-DEV and Appdome-DEV PLUS customers, we are also now releasing a new series of build-to-publish APIs, that allow developers to delegate a specific action (e.g., securing the build, app signing, publication, etc.) to Appdome. For organizations that are building thousands of apps, ensuring that all these apps get the same, CISO approved, security posture is now possible Appdome. With Appdome’s CI/CD integration, adding this approved security template to each app is fully automated and seamlessly integrated in the build process. Most importantly, Appdome provides a guaranteed audit trail to the CISO that no app goes to production without being fully secured.
Today Appdome has become a key component in the release process of large organizations who are using the Appdome APIs to build security into 10,0000s of mobile apps. We are very proud and humbled by this.
Better DevSecOps Collaboration
To streamline collaboration on Appdome, we’re combining Release Teams, Workspaces Team Management, Auto Publishing, and more in a new advanced services group called Appdome-DEV Collaboration Tools. And we’re introducing the following enhancements:
Mobile app release teams are the central part of the way developers, IT, and security teams (DevSecOps) collaborate and use Appdome. I want to thank everyone that contributed to the evolution and use of our mobile app release team and release management features we’ve added over the past year. We appreciate your feedback!
To make Appdome’s mobile app release team features even more powerful, we’re and upgrading the product and user interface with a new concept called “workspaces.” Workspaces visually separates each user’s personal workspace and team workspace. This allows users to move quickly between the personal workspace and team workspaces, facilitating individual testing, UAT, pre-production, and production workflows simultaneously. It allows users to create teams more quickly. It also allows users to move apps and security templates easily between the personal workspace and one or more team workspaces, as well as clone and reuse templates across teams.
Team Management, team permissions, roles and entitlements have also been enhanced. You can find the new Team Management features under each user’s profile tab. Existing features, including the ability to lock mobile app security templates and secure account segmentation, remain unchanged and fully compatible with workspaces.
Adding Obfuscation, Encryption, App Shielding, MiTM Protection, Jailbreak and Root Prevention, Mobile Fraud Detection and more to mobile apps is hard. It takes time, skill and resources and it needs to be repeated for every new build, and every new release. And because most of the time, it is done manually, getting to a guaranteed and repeatable security outcome is even harder. Release Teams and Team management allows the organization to collaborate directly on the Appdome product, ensuring every release is secure and meets the standards of the CISO organization and end users.
Support for AAB, Android 11 and iOS 14
Expanded file formats and automated testing of security features inside apps is also a big part of how security releases get done. So, we expanded our support to new file formats and plan to do even more in this area in the weeks and months to come. For example, two months ago, we began supporting Android Application Bundles (AAB) with Appdome mobile app security features and now offer AAB support for selected SDKs partners on Appdome. Android App Bundle is Android’s new, official publishing format that offers a more efficient way to build and release Android apps to Google Play. By publishing your apps using AAB, developers can reduce the size of their app, simplify releases, and deliver features on demand. Because of these added benefits, AAB is now the recommended publishing format on Google Play. On the Appdome platform, all AAB support includes advanced, automated signing and direct publishing to Google Play.
The next big Android release is OS Android 11. If you want to join our pre-release Beta programs for Android 11, please contact the Appdome support team.
And if you’re an iOS developer, Appdome was ready on day 1 of the iOS14 release, including support for the new widgets. A big thank you to everyone who tested their apps on Appdome as part of the iOS 14 Beta program!
The Future of Appdome is on the Rise
These release updates help our customers add security to their mobile apps at scale. According to AppAnnie, in just a few months, the pandemic has advanced mobile app usage by 2 to 3 years. And Appdome is the best platform to give app developers the confidence that they can honor the trust consumers have in their brand and prevent costly security breaches of their apps.
With these release updates, Appdome is making automating mobile app security and building security at scale easier than ever. And as a recent article in Devops.com put it very well, automation early on helps developers focus on what matters the most: optimizing their product and developing new features without having to worry about security-related maintenance tasks.
This is our promise to you. With Appdome you can instantly secure all the apps you develop and protect the users and businesses who rely on your apps. No matter how many apps you build, how often you release or what mobile development framework you use. Appdome has your back. We guarantee it.
Please enjoy these new features and capabilities. I and the rest of the team at Appdome are here to help you secure your mobile apps quickly and efficiently. And if you’re not yet an Appdome customers, you can start by creating your Appdome account today.
