A couple quick searches for “ftx app react native” makes me believe at least part of their app, if not the entire thing, is react native (it’s possible to have

A couple quick searches for “ftx app react native” makes me believe at least part of their app, if not the entire thing, is react native (it’s possible to have a hybrid native/react native app). It’s totally possible and quite common to be able to load the JavaScript bundle from a remote server. Microsoft has a service to do exactly that called Codepush. Expo also has a service and it’s not very complex to roll your own. How a react native app works is all the native code is compiled into a “shell” of an app and then a JavaScript bundle is loaded (it can be shipped in the binary or loaded from a server) and that’s where all the layout and logic lives. Not only is it possible to make small changes, you could conceivably ship an entirely new app this way as long as you don’t need to add any new native dependencies. Of course the App Store/Play Store don’t allow “major” changes, but they have no real way of knowing. In Apple’s case, you need to provide them with a login for them to review the app (not sure about the play store, but possibly them too). It would be trivially to load one bundle for Apple and another for everyone else. If you had control of the backend you could even target specific accounts and load a compromised bundle with no one else the wiser. It’s fairly easy to strip out the JS bundle to examen, so I’d say targeted attacks would be the smart way to do it. It would give you a lot of time before people caught on vs compromising everyone. I’m sure there’s folks out there already tearing into the js bundle looking for shenanigans.