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Using Proxyman to reverse engineer the Instagram private API

Alex Schnabl
5 min readApr 28, 2023

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Proxyman

Introduction

In recent years social media platforms like Instagram have become ingrained in our daily routines and have a tremendous impact on our society. To utilize these platforms to their full potential one might consider automating certain workflows. In this example we will look at Instagram. While Instagram’s official API is available for developers, it only provides access to a very limited set of functions. However, with the help of various reverse engineering techniques, developers can monitor Instagram’s private API and unlock additional features. In this article we will explore how to patch the Instagram APK and use Proxyman, a popular proxy tool, to reverse engineer the Instagram private API. By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of how to patch an APK and how to leverage reverse engineering techniques to peek into APIs they dont want you to see.

Enable Whitehat settings on Facbook Profile

(This step is not neccessarry because we are patching the APK and we will be overriding the emulator certificate but I included it anyways)

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Alex Schnabl
Alex Schnabl

Written by Alex Schnabl

Entrepreneur & Software Developer

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