[aaaashley]

Bryce Bostwick does super cool & inspiring work on debugging and reverse-engineering apps. I found him on YouTube; His video on modding TikTok to only show cat videos (https://youtu.be/YW3jL2gI9IE) inspired me to mod Instagram to remove everything except the message feature, which is the only part I use. I've been meaning to get more into modding & reverse engineering–specifically modding Windows in the style of Windhawk (https://windhawk.net/). Bryce gives a great intro to doing that sort of thing on iOS with live, step-by-step videos.

[xmprt]

If anyone knows someone similar for Android, I'd be interested in learning more. I've seen some of the impressive things that can be done using Revanced but there don't seem to be good guides for how to get started with something like that.

[Oxodao]

I'd also like to fond one such youtuber. If you want to get started though your best bet is probably combining jadx-gui (an amazing decompiler targetting Android) alongside with apktool to disassemble / patch / reassemble your apk and uber-apk-signer to sign it back afterward with mitmproxy to snoop on the API calls. That's my setup whenever i poke around old apps and try to make server emulators for them. A really cool tool is also Frida and xposed which lets you quickly hook into the apps.

I'm pretty new to RE though this kind of videos are super interesting for me

[jcul]

I used to do a decent bit of android reverse engineering.

It's pretty easy to grab an app, decompile and disassembly it, find what you need to change and then patch the smali and recompile.

It's been a long time since I looked at that stuff, but I think I used to use apktool and smali / baksmali from memory.

I remember something like dex2jar also, which gave you a jar you could use in any java decompiler, like jdgui, procyon etc. Easier to find what you are looking for in the decompiled java and then patch the smali. Lots of android apps are obfuscated, but you can do stuff like add logs to the smali etc, probably remote debugging etc.

It has been a while, so that info might be woefully out of date now.

[iggldiggl]

> I remember something like dex2jar also, which gave you a jar you could use in any java decompiler, like jdgui, procyon etc.

https://github.com/skylot/jadx is very handy for that nowadays. It also supports interactive variable/method/class name renaming to make the decomplied code easier to read. The decompiler isn't perfect, but I guess all available Java decompilers have their limitations with more complex bytecode…

[darkhorse222]

Im going to try do what you described. But if you happen to write down the steps I'm interested. I hate that to post photos or chat with friends I have to be exposed to reels.