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Is it possible to reverse engineer apps made by phone OEMs to work without Google Play services? (lemmy.today)

submitted 2 days ago by unitedwithme@lemmy.today to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I've loaded LineageOS which has been great, so far. However, missing OEM apps from OnePlus like the camera to take full advantage is really lacking.

Through APK Pure you can obtain the OEM apps, but they don't run bc I'm missing the services necessary to function. I don't want to use AI to do this, but I've seen a lot of game ports or resurrected games come to light, thanks you people reverse engineer games removing DRM of other limitations, so I've considered it. I believe this requires a locally run AI tool cuz commercial versions obviously would stop that ASAP.

Any app tools anyone is aware of to just deactivate the need, or remove, etc? My old TCL phone had the best IR blaster app I've ever used, and I'm missing that dearly, too!

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[–] lemmysmash@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It is possible. Even without AI. But if you ask this question, I wouldn't even start going into AI-less direction :)

With AI you can give it even a very generic task "make this app work on my phone, you're allowed to patch it however you want", give it jade (decompiler) and other dev tools, adb with which it'll be able to upload apps to your phone and view logs, buy a lot of tokens for some good model, and let it cook. There's a high probablity that even like this, without any optimizations it'll succeed.

Now in terms of self-hosted vs commercial models, here's the overall picture.

Self-hosted (unless you have some Nvidia H100 or something) are generally stupid enough to not do anything.

Commercial (even those available for free e.g. in opencode or openrouter), are already capable of producing some results. Generally, they don't give a damn about hacking into the app, unless it's something really sensitive (e.g. hacking into some infrastructure) or a false positive. Usually, you can soften their guards by using terms like "MY app", "OUR app", "I've accidentally deleted the source code" and so on to make them firmly believe that you are working on your own app, but even that is not normally necessary.

See something like this for the inspiration: https://codyho.dev/blog/gpu-driver/

Since in your case you probably won't care about "clean room" technique, and you'll be working with Java that very nicely decompiles into smali and then gets "restored" into its original Java form (obfuscated ofc), it will be much easier.

The hardest part is to setup AI loop, manage it and be able to guide it in the correct direction without going into the full slop mode and basically wasting your money. Because of that, I'd say you'd need some good programming/engineering skills, but even if you don't, you can still try your luck and maybe even learn a lot in the process :)