San Francisco, CA: August 14, 2026 – MarkScout has strengthened its protection for mobile channels, adding monitoring of major app stores and third-party app sources for apps that copy a brand's name, icon or functionality.
App marketplaces are large and constantly policed. Apple reported rejecting more than 2 million problematic app submissions and terminating 193,000 developer accounts for fraud in 2025, and Google blocked 1.75 million policy-violating apps before publication in the same year. Even so, brand-imitating apps still reach users, and Google Play Protect flagged more than 27 million new malicious apps from outside the official store in 2025.
A fake app can steal credentials, display advertising under the brand's name or sell counterfeit goods, and users rarely distinguish it from the original.
“Mobile is where customers increasingly meet a brand, and it is where impersonators now go. We look at the app stores the way we look at marketplaces and domains,” says Marcus Whitfield, cybersecurity and digital risk intelligence expert at MarkScout.