Our present world is marked by geopolitical tension, eroded trust between nations, tech-sanctions, and an AI-driven industrial revolution. Securing the digital realm has never been more necessary. This security need is displayed on two fronts.
The ancient adage that ‘change is the only constant’ is not only true but accelerating at pace. As discussions around a new Moore’s Law for AI emerge, it seems that the speed of innovation now outpaces our ability to fully understand, secure, and regulate it effectively.
Threats may look familiar, but their execution evolves at breakneck velocity. Attackers employ AI to shrink time-to-exploit, leaving defenders with less opportunity to patch and respond.
But when strategically leveraged, AI can also act as a force multiplier for defenders. For example, it can help with automating detection and analysis, accelerating patching, and enabling teams to respond faster. In that sense, the age-old cat-and-mouse security game continues. The only difference is that it’s played at machine-speed.
Let’s look into the magic crystal ball and explore what 2026 may hold across app security, AI, compliance, post-quantum cryptography, and the software supply chain.
With Google’s work on combining Android and ChromeOS into a single platform, the boundary between mobile and desktop will continue to blur. This move is driven in part by the company’s desire to streamline development and introduce more unified experiences across laptops, tablets, and phones.
A unified OS will enable a more seamless app experience across devices, an experience that travels beyond today’s browser-based or mobile-app-on-desktop setups. Users will benefit from Android’s vast ecosystem of apps.
From a development perspective, this means fewer platform splits, fewer OS-specific skillsets, and stronger potential for cross-device reuse. As consumers adopt devices blurring phone, foldable, tablet and laptop form-factors, the security posture of that unified layer becomes a critical frontier.
Meanwhile, a rising challenger in the mobile/desktop OS space is Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT. This OS marks a clear shift from prior versions tied to Android. HarmonyOS NEXT is completely independent from Android and, like the Android + ChromeOS merge, designed for multi-device scenarios (phones, tablets, desktop) under a single ecosystem. In China especially, Huawei is pushing the new platform and its own app-store model (AppGallery) as part of a broader diversification away from the Android/Google ecosystem.
From a security perspective, these shifts matter for several reasons.
As we look toward 2026, defenders must prepare for ecosystems where security strategies built for isolated mobile/desktop silos will need updating.
Irrespective of direction, AI is reshaping every aspect of today’s life. Productivity and efficiency are skyrocketing, but so are the speed and sophistication of attacks. Deepfakes now drive social-engineering campaigns at scale. Even established media outlets struggle to separate truth from fabrication.
We’ll see the quality of AI-generated content improving rapidly, enabling and simplifying whole new categories of attack. For example, remote user identification via camera is becoming more relevant as identity-wallets and digital onboarding take off, especially with EUDI looming on the horizon. But at the same time, doing this securely and reliably is becoming far more complex as AI grows increasingly capable of producing highly convincing deepfakes. The same AI-generated content may also be used for fraud, disinformation, and identity bypass.
Read more: Emerging threats in mobile AI: What businesses need to know
Another area of interest is the early stage of agentic AI. These are systems that can autonomously plan and execute complex tasks, split them into subtasks, evaluate multiple options, gather data from many sources, and produce solutions. Such systems promise a desirable future, allowing us to focus on strategy rather than rote tasks.
But they also bring dangers. Autonomous or semi-autonomous agents may also be used to execute reconnaissance, phishing, exploitation, and even full attack chains. A new generation of ‘ransomware-as-a-service' is beginning to form.
We’ll find ourselves in an ongoing, three-way arms race between:
By 2026, we should expect this battleground to sharpen.
AI agents will likely become more embedded into both defense and offense. Generated-media attacks will move beyond novelty into mainstream threat vectors. And organizations will need to rethink how AI changes the perimeter, identity, and trust models.
Read more: How to protect your AI-driven mobile apps against emerging security threats
The compliance landscape is quickly evolving into a driver of security investment rather than an afterthought. Existing frameworks like GDPR, the EU AI Act, and NIS2 are expanding in scope and enforcement.
In 2026, the regulatory landscape will experience both convergence (shared global baselines) and fragmentation (region-specific mandates).
Organizations must treat compliance as a strategic enabler of trust and differentiation, as well as risk reduction, and not just as a checkbox.
Read more: Transaction Risk Analysis under PSD2: Turning compliance into competitive advantage
Supply-chain compromise remains one of the most effective attack strategies. This means attackers are increasingly targeting dependencies like third like party/open-source libraries.
Even if apps are designed by security-first-principles, attackers may compromise apps by targeting dependencies. This way, a third-party library can become the gateway for compromise and fraud if it is not properly secured and managed. AI-driven exploit development further shortens the window between vulnerability disclosure and weaponization.
Read more: From framework to action: A new roadmap for securing AI in mobile apps
The first NIST standards for post-quantum cryptography are now published:
This means that the race to close the quantum transition gap has officially begun. Additional algorithms and standards are in progress, but the brand-new standards mark a decisive turning point: the start of practical migration.
In 2026, we’ll see widely used software and cryptographic libraries leading the way in adopting these new algorithms.
For example, many open-source crypto libraries already include (partially experimental) support, and enterprises can start enabling PQC capabilities through software updates. Rollout speed on this will vary, since migration won’t be straightforward.
Even organizations with a cryptographic inventory will face delays due to:
A particular challenge lies in Public-Key Infrastructures (PKIs), which form the backbone of digital trust. Migrating certificates means replacing certification authorities. This process also is delayed by the ongoing work on hybrid certificates, where traditional and post-quantum algorithms coexist within a single certificate.
Such a hybrid approach, designed to provide continuity and compatibility, is expected to reach standardization maturity by 2026.
On the positive side, TLS PQC key exchange is already deployment-ready, marking one of the first tangible steps toward PQ-safe communication.
Meanwhile, quantum research is accelerating. The estimated number of stable qubits required to break, e.g. RSA-2048 continues to decline, inching closer to feasible thresholds. This is still years away, but it is close enough to fully to justify the ‘harvest-now, decrypt-later' concern. At the same time, new (quantum-based) algorithms for attacking cryptography are emerging. This is a sign of the field’s vitality.
If one theme unites these predictions, it is that of acceleration.
We predict 2026 to be a year of rapid scaling, where innovation, regulation, and risk all accelerate in parallel.
AI, mobile convergence, compliance pressure, and quantum readiness will all reshape how we define security in 2026.
The future will demand security that travels with the application. Acceleration demands protection that is built in, not bolted on. Software security can only keep pace if it is intelligent, adaptive, and frictionless. That’s the world Promon is building toward: making the world of 2026 safer, one app at a time.