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I have a feeling that any piece of closed-source software that becomes important enough will inevitably be reverse engineered by highly motivated people. This i

I have a feeling that any piece of closed-source software that becomes important enough will inevitably be reverse engineered by highly motivated people. This is doubly so for Vanced: The original team took pains to not release the source, but it merely took a few weeks for someone else to reverse engineer the reverse engineered codebase. I've worked on preserving a few games with decompilers long after the original creators have moved on. Anecdotally, the death of Flash all but killed off a couple of assorted communities that didn't have enough motivation to hack the binaries themselves. My guess is the only software that can perpetually maintain a community is software where the source code is available to be modified.

og_pixel 5y ago
I don't know much about the topic so forgive my ignorance, but aren't Android apps written in Java/JVM language? Meaning decompilation should be really straightforward, I remember IntelliJ having a decompiler, many times I would accidental open a `class` file and it would suggest decompilation. This kind of code was still hard to read, but it was Java, not bytecode.
- daveloyall 5y ago
  It's all relative, I'm sure, and I don't have any experience with decompilers other than this one: https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/ https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/, but, if you look at the change log there you will see that "really straightforward" is an unfortunately optimistic outlook. :)
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Nah, java can be decompiled really really well. To the point that basically every app uses obfuscation to make the resulting code harder to comprehend.
- michaelmior 5y ago
  Generally it's not too hard to decompile. But whether the code is any way readable or easy to modify is another question.
- bradleykingz 5y ago
  Android has ProGuard, which makes decompilation harder, but certainly not impossible if one is motivated enough.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    ProGuard does basic name minification and some code movement. It is easy to read proguarded bytecode if you have a bit of experience.
siccophantic 5y ago
throwaway684936 5y ago
There was literally no source code to release. YouTube Vance was a hex edited YouTube app binary.

og_pixel 5y ago

I don't know much about the topic so forgive my ignorance, but aren't Android apps written in Java/JVM language? Meaning decompilation should be really straightforward, I remember IntelliJ having a decompiler, many times I would accidental open a `class` file and it would suggest decompilation. This kind of code was still hard to read, but it was Java, not bytecode.

daveloyall 5y ago
It's all relative, I'm sure, and I don't have any experience with decompilers other than this one: https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/ https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/, but, if you look at the change log there you will see that "really straightforward" is an unfortunately optimistic outlook. :)
- kaba0 5y ago
  Nah, java can be decompiled really really well. To the point that basically every app uses obfuscation to make the resulting code harder to comprehend.
michaelmior 5y ago
Generally it's not too hard to decompile. But whether the code is any way readable or easy to modify is another question.
bradleykingz 5y ago
Android has ProGuard, which makes decompilation harder, but certainly not impossible if one is motivated enough.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  ProGuard does basic name minification and some code movement. It is easy to read proguarded bytecode if you have a bit of experience.

siccophantic 5y ago

throwaway684936 5y ago

There was literally no source code to release. YouTube Vance was a hex edited YouTube app binary.