This whole article is just for exploratory and educational purposes. I do not endorse any unethical hacking or reverse engineering of any kind. Nor do I advise or teach how to do so.

Hi, Sophomore year of my comp sci degree has left me with absolutely zero free time, and when I do get some, occasionally I have way too much to do rather than spend it on Instagram, like writing this blog post 😅. So I decided to fix my screen time by reverse engineering Instagram and somehow making it impossible to scroll reels.

The story 📖

Some time ago a lil bird told me about apktool, Apktool makes it super easy for you to decompile apks and then recompile them back.

It makes decompiling as simple as

apktool d [apkfile] --no-res 

The --no-res flag makes sure that the resources are not decompiled, which is not needed for our purpose.

Once we have the decompiled code in a folder, I started looking through it. Since apktool only decompiles to .smali files, It wasn’t very readable. Smali is a type of assembly language for the Dalvik VM, which is the VM that runs Android apps.

Even though the code was barely understandable a bit of substantial info was the file names. I tried to find relevant files by searching for reel and I found a folder named reels.Eventually, I found a file named ReelViewerConfig.smali looking for a quick dirty fix to test if this was even possible. I deleted the writoParcel function in the same file and recompiled the apk.

apktool b [decompiled-folder] -o [output-apk]

Cool! We have the apk but to make it installed on a phone we need to zipalign it and then sign the resulting apk. I used zipalign and keytool to do so. The following article elaborates in depth. Hacktricks article.

After aligning and signing it we finally have an installable apk. Next, I transferred it and installed the modified apk on my phone, and welp to my surprise the reels were still working, hmm that’s weird, I accidentally opened a story, and poof. The app crashed. welp? What’s going on? Deleting the function did give the desired effect but for stories, not reels.

Upon researching a bit I found out the internal name for Stories is “reel” meanwhile internal name for Reels is “clips”. So I went back to the decompiled code and found a file named ClipsViewerConfig.smali and deleted the writeToParcel function in that file. Recompiled the apk and installed it on my phone. opened the Instagram app and tried to open a reel and poof! the app crashed. The app crashed even when a reel came on my feed or I clicked on one. No more watching or scrolling reels.

While this is not a perfect solution, Ideally I would love to just disable the scroll action. but as mentioned no time! hopefully, I’ll update this Sometime in the future. Until then see ya.

~ with 💖 by Om.