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How to hack (reverse engineer) an Android App

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What do we mean when we talk about hacking or cracking Android apps to get their paid versions for free or to remove ads or enable paid features? How do so many websites give away premium apks and apps for free? How do they crack them? The answer to all of these questions is just 2 words - Reverse Engineering.  Reverse engineering refers to the art of opening up an application or a piece of software from the bottom up; that is, peeling it layer by layer until we reach the very core mechanisms of the app. At this point, we can figure out ways in which various app components work together and look at exploits to take advantage of these interdependencies. Now, let's look at how we can reverse engineer an Android app. Getting the APK file The first step to reverse-engineering an app, is to get the apk file. Android apps (or APKs) are really just ZIP files with a new extension. Inside is everything the app needs to run—from the code to any media it might need. There are ...
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How does FaceApp: AI photo editor work?

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FaceApp is a free app that can be downloaded to your device from the AppStore or Google Play. Currently, there are 21 free filters in the basic version. Recently, the app has gone viral again with a lot of celebrities posting pictures of their older selves created using the app. In fact, this has started an entirely new challenge called the FaceApp challenge on various social media channels like Twitter and Instagram. Amidst all this virality, there is one question I am sure a lot of you might be asking right now. How does this FaceApp work? To be honest this question would occur in anyone's mind. Even more so because the app is doing such a tremendous job of creating life-like pictures. We tried contacting the developers to know more about this, but they did not give out any details. (Duhh). But, fret not. We did not stop just there. We have been talking to a lot of people, and following similar questions being asked on other similar places . Below, we ...
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FaceApp: Ready to face the security and privacy issues?

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FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been having another viral moment of late, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we covered earlier here . You can find the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post. The tl;dr here is that concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup, uploads users’ photos to the cloud — without making it clear to them that processing is not going on locally on their device. Another issue raised by FaceApp users was that the iOS app appears to be overriding settings if a user had denied access to their camera roll, after people reported they could still select and upload a photo — i.e. despite the app not having permission to access their photos. As we reported earlier, the latter is actually allowed behavior in iOS — which gives users the power to choose to block an app from full camera roll access but select individual photos to upload if they so wish. This isn’t a conspiracy, though Apple could probably come up w...
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