Antonio Nappa
App Analysis Lead
Zimperium
Antonio Nappa is the Application Analysis Team Leader at Zimperium Inc. He has been in the cybersecurity game since 17 years old. He holds a PhD in Software and Systems from the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. His contributions have been published and recognized in international peer-reviewed venues. Since the DEFCON 2008 Finals, he never goes to sleep with a segfault.
All Answers, AIs? What Three Years of AI-Assisted Mobile Development Actually Delivered
Lightning talk
We now have an AI for every answer. Increasingly, one AI writes the code, another reviews it, and a third tries to break it.
With good steering, domain knowledge, and human judgment, these tools are valuable. But using them across the whole mobile lifecycle creates a dangerous illusion that faster generation means the hard parts of engineering have disappeared. They have not.
This talk looks at how mobile development changed from 2023 to 2026, beyond the demos and social media claims. We compare AI security detectors against established analysis, count the false positives, and show real Android code that was AI generated, AI reviewed, AI scanned, and still shipped with exploitable bugs.
The same acceleration is reaching reverse engineering, from Frida instrumentation to obfuscated code. Speed is not mastery.
AI made many parts of the process faster. Quality, stability, maintainability, and security still require real work.