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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty standard stuff to obfuscate your code when you distribute your app to a phone to protect against decompiling and sometimes just to save space.

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It's also pretty standard stuff to obfuscate your code when you're doing something dirty. The problem with obfuscation is that, for the end user, there's not a great way to determine which use case the developer had in mind which means one should probably approach such an application with extreme caution.

It's user-hostile no matter what the intentions are. In an ideal world, the market would punish companies that treat their own users as attackers.

How is it user-hostile to obfuscate your source code? It doesn’t change the user experience, just makes it more difficult to reverse engineer which would be against the EULA anyway.

Most anti-reversing clauses in EULAs wouldn't get past a court because of public policy concerns (i.e, recovering the systems/methods/algorithms used by an app is a legitimate form of competition and we don't want copyright or contract law to get in the way of that)

mommyyy dji didn't upload their source code to github so we could clone it then ban them on the grounds of national security, mooooom!!1

I'm sure TSMC also not bringing their latest node tech to their US fabs also happens to be because they're doing something dirty! oh wait, corporations want to protect their IP, and countries have time and time again proven that they're willing to enter the private business to give their country an edge.

Most of the kinds of obfuscating DJI is doing make the app take up more space.

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