It’s not impossible, just very labour intensive and difficult. Compiling an abstract, high level language into machine code is not a reversible process. Even though there are already automated tools to “decompile” machine code back to a high level language, there is still a huge amount of information loss as nearly everything that made the code readable in the first place was stripped away in compilation. Comments? Gone. Function names? Gone. Class names? Gone. Type information? Probably also gone.
Working through the decompiled code to bring it back into something readable (and thus something that can be worked with) is not something a lone “very smart person” can do in any reasonable time. It takes likely a team of smart people months of work (if not years) to understand the entire structure, as well as every function and piece of logic in the entire program. Once they’ve done that, they can’t even use their work directly, since to publish reconstructed code is copyright infringement. Instead, they need to write extremely detailed documentation about every aspect of the program, to be handed to another, completely isolated person who will then write a new program based off the logic and APIs detailed in the documentation. Only at that point do they have a legally usable reverse engineered program that they can then distribute or modify as needed.
Doing this kind of reverse engineering takes a huge amount of effort and motivation, something that an app for 350 total sneakers is unlikely to warrant. AI can’t do it either, because they are incapable of the kind of novel deductive reasoning required for the task. Also, the CarThing has actually always been “open-source”, and people have already experimented with flashing custom firmware. You haven’t heard about it because people quickly realised there was no point - the CarThing is too underpowered to do much beyond its original use.
Thank you for adding this! If people want a real life example of the effect shown in this pseudocode, here is a side-by-side comparison of real production code I wrote and it’s decompiled counterpart:
override fun process(event: MapStateEvent) { when(event) { is MapStateEvent.LassoButtonClicked -> { action( MapStateAction.LassoButtonSelected(false), MapStateAction.Transition(BrowseMapState::class.java) ) } is MapStateEvent.SaveSearchClicked -> { save(event.name) } // Propagated from the previous level is MapStateEvent.LassoCursorLifted -> { load(event.line + event.line.first()) } is MapStateEvent.ClusterClick -> { when (val action = ClusterHelper.handleClick(event.cluster)) { is ClusterHelper.Action.OpenBottomDialog -> action(MapStateAction.OpenBottomDialog(action.items)) is ClusterHelper.Action.AnimateCamera -> action(MapStateAction.AnimateCamera(action.animation)) } } is MapStateEvent.ClusterItemClick -> { action( MapStateAction.OpenItem(event.item.proposal) ) } else -> {} } }decompiled:
public void c(@l j jVar) { L.p(jVar, D.f10724I0); if (jVar instanceof j.c) { f(new i.h(false), new i.r(c.class, (j) null, 2, (C2498w) null)); } else if (jVar instanceof j.e) { m(((j.e) jVar).f8620a); } else if (jVar instanceof j.d) { List<LatLng> list = ((j.d) jVar).f8619a; j(I.A4(list, I.w2(list))); } else if (jVar instanceof j.a) { d.a a7 = d.f8573a.a(((j.a) jVar).f8616a); if (a7 instanceof d.a.b) { f(new i.j(((d.a.b) a7).f8575a)); } else if (a7 instanceof d.a.C0058a) { f(new i.a(((d.a.C0058a) a7).f8574a)); } } else if (jVar instanceof j.b) { f(new i.k(((j.b) jVar).f8617a.f11799a)); } }keep in mind, this was buried in hundreds of unlabeled classes and functions. I was only able to find this in a short amount of time because I have the most intimate knowledge of the code possible, having written it myself.