Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd

Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd

Author: Software Engineering Daily April 9, 2026 Duration: 54:52

Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the user’s device, which is an environment the developer doesn’t control. That makes mobile apps uniquely exposed to reverse engineering, runtime manipulation, and fraud.

As more critical functionality shifts to mobile, the need to harden apps against sophisticated attackers continues to grow. Guardsquare builds tools to protect and test mobile applications against both static and dynamic threats. Its platform has features including layered code obfuscation, runtime application self-protection, mobile-specific security testing, threat monitoring, and API attestation.

Ryan Lloyd is the Chief Product Officer at Guardsquare. In this episode, he joins Gregor Vand to discuss why mobile security differs from desktop and web security, how reverse engineering tools have evolved, the role of compiler-based obfuscation and runtime protections, common mobile app vulnerabilities, and how LLMs are reshaping the attacker landscape.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Guardsquare.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive into a curated collection from the vast library of Software Engineering Daily with Greatest Hits Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This podcast isn't about new trends or breaking news; instead, it serves as a thoughtfully assembled replay of the most impactful and enduring conversations from the show's history. Each episode selected for this archive represents a foundational discussion, a pivotal interview, or a deep exploration that has resonated deeply with the technology community over the years. You'll hear veteran engineers, pioneering founders, and insightful researchers break down complex topics-from distributed systems and database architecture to the human elements of building effective teams and sustainable engineering cultures. The archive format allows listeners to experience the essential building blocks of modern software thought leadership, all in one dedicated feed. Whether you're discovering these classic conversations for the first time or revisiting them with fresh perspective, this podcast provides a timeless resource. It cuts through the noise of the daily tech cycle to deliver substantive content that remains relevant long after its original release, offering a masterclass in the principles and practices that define our industry.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Scaling Agent Workloads at Vercel [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:25
Most AI agent setups today are built around a single session, where one user interacts with one agent at a time. However, that model breaks down when an agent has to serve a business, where thousands of requests can arri…
Inside Google’s Database Infrastructure for the AI Era [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:18:26
Historically, databases were responsible for storing data and returning exact results in response to queries. However, AI is now bending that contract in a new direction. Applications increasingly expect structured and u…
A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:31
A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems Building software that runs across many machines is notoriously difficult. Developers have to grapple with problems such as race conditions, partial failures, and message…
Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:48
Retrieval has become one of the central problems in building useful AI systems. The standard approach to grounding a model in one’s own data has been retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, where an agent searches a vect…
The Death of Online Anonymity [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:42
Age verification is reshaping how people access the internet. An ever-growing patchwork of laws can now require government IDs, facial age estimation, or behavioral inference before you can enter digital spaces. Discord,…
TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:15
TypeScript is a programming language that builds on JavaScript by adding a system of types. Those types let developers describe the shape of their data and catch mistakes before code ever runs, while also powering the au…
The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:42
It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those…
AI and the New Global Security Landscape [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:32
The conversation about AI often focuses on software, automation, and the race between attackers and defenders in code. However, some of the most consequential risks lie further afield, in domains where a mistake is measu…
How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:51
News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a sy…