Reverse engineering BeReal

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2024-04-30 04:30:04

Reverse engineering has always intrigued me, offering the opportunity to unlock the potential of apps with private APIs that companies prefer to keep hidden. In this article, I’ll share my journey of reverse engineering the popular social media app BeReal.

BeReal is a social media app that has recently gained popularity. Where the whole idea is at a random time every day, all users in a region will get a notification when it is time to “Be Real.” When you receive the notification, you post a photo of whatever you are doing at the moment. The catch is that you can only see your friends’ posts after posting your BeReal for the day and will only see blurred images before. I wanted to reverse-engineer the app to see if viewing your friends’ posts from a web browser instead of the app is possible.

The first thing I like to do when reverse engineering a new application is inspect the network requests and see what you can find. The requests show what data an app requests from servers, which is crucial in reverse engineering. Finding network requests is easy for web applications as all modern browsers allow you to see network requests a site is making. Google provides a guide for how to inspect networking activity on Chrome.