NowSecure has announced Mobile App Risk Intelligence (MARI), new capabilities that give enterprises evidence-based visibility into third-party mobile apps, as hidden AI features, opaque code, and unseen data flows create a growing governance gap.

Employees are adopting mobile apps faster than security teams can evaluate them, and many of those apps now include AI components, third-party services and cross-border data flows that conventional review methods often fail to detect before risk is introduced. MARI addresses that problem with evidence-based visibility that supports faster, more defensible approval decisions.

MARI shows what a mobile app actually does, including hidden AI and large language model components, data flows and third-party code. While this launch is focused on strengthening governance for third-party mobile apps, the same mobile app intelligence also supports organizations that need to validate and secure the apps they build themselves.

NowSecure’s recent testing of 50,000 mobile apps found that 53% contain AI components. Many of those components are not visible through traditional app review processes, increasing the likelihood of unauthorized data sharing, policy violations and exposure to higher-risk jurisdictions before security teams have reliable evidence to act.

“AI is making an already under-governed mobile app problem much harder for enterprises to ignore,” said NowSecure CEO Alan Snyder. “Security teams are being asked to approve more third-party mobile apps, with more opaque code, more embedded services and more data risk, but without the evidence they need to make confident decisions. MARI closes that visibility gap.”

Third-party mobile apps remain a blind spot for many enterprise security and compliance programs because conventional tools often do not show how a shipped app actually behaves. MARI is built to address that problem at enterprise scale, expanding NowSecure’s support for third-party app governance with deeper evidence, fuller findings and capabilities that include:

• Detection of embedded AI and LLM components
• Country-level visibility into app data flows
• Inventory of SDKs, libraries and other third-party code inside the app
• Fuller finding visibility and evidence to support more confident risk decisions
• Support for reviewing large mobile app portfolios at enterprise scale
• Plain-language summaries that connect technical findings to business impact
• Exportable reporting to support audit, compliance and governance workflows
• Policy-based rules to automate app review decisions at scale

Frederick County, Maryland, has used this approach to strengthen mobile app approval decisions across county government.

“Mobile apps are a critical part of how we deliver services to Frederick County and we needed a repeatable and defensible way to make app approval decisions, especially given the scale of requests we receive and the cybersecurity risks to mobile devices,” said Rich Campbell, Information Security Lead, Frederick County (Md.) Government.

“NowSecure has been essential for identifying if an application is adding AI capabilities, what data it’s collecting and how that data is shared. This level of visibility is very useful for managing these emerging risks and keeping our community secure,” Campbell added.

Beyond direct enterprise use, NowSecure also delivers mobile app risk intelligence to selected partners that embed app-level risk signals into broader endpoint, mobility and security platforms.

“Organizations that enable their workforce with mobile technologies must also manage an increasingly broad set of mobile-first risks,” said Michael Covington, VP of Portfolio Strategy for Jamf. “To effectively manage this, IT teams must be armed with deep visibility and robust controls across each layer in the mobility stack. With NowSecure’s binary-level mobile app analysis, organizations using the Jamf platform are now armed with timely intelligence to inform app-oriented policies.”