Methods, systems and devices compute and use the execution session contexts of software applications to perform behavioral monitoring and analysis operations. A mobile device may be configured to monitor user activity and system activity of a software application, generate a shadow feature value that identifies actual execution session context of the software application during that activity, generate a behavior vector that incorporates context into the values describing behaviors, and determine whether the activity is malicious or benign based, at least in part, on the generated behavior vector. The mobile device processor may also be configured to intelligently determine whether the execution session context of a software application is relevant to determining whether any of the monitored mobile device behaviors are malicious or suspicious, and monitor only the execution session contexts of the software applications for which such determinations are relevant.