(In)Security of Mobile Apps in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

In developing countries, several key sectors, including education, finance,
agriculture, and healthcare, mainly deliver their services via mobile app
technology on handheld devices. As a result, mobile app security has emerged as
a paramount issue in developing countries. In this paper, we investigate the
state of research on mobile app security, focusing on developing countries.
More specifically, we performed a systematic literature review exploring the
research directions taken by existing works, the different security concerns
addressed, and the techniques used by researchers to highlight or address app
security issues. Our main findings are: (1) the literature includes only a few
studies on mobile app security in the context of developing countries ; (2)
among the different security concerns that researchers study, vulnerability
detection appears to be the leading research topic; (3) FinTech apps are
revealed as the main target in the relevant literature. Overall, our work
highlights that there is largely room for developing further specialized
techniques addressing mobile app security in the context of developing
countries.