Ha, I found myself going down a similar route and threw in the towel once I was trying to decompile/edit/recompile. This is dedication, would love to know the hours involved. I set myself a cutoff and stuck to it.
I initially spent two hours trying to modify different instructions, and then gave up. I saw another blog post written by a reverse engineer by the name of "Hassan Mostafa" (aka cyclon3) that previously succeeded in the same approach (taking Hopper Disassembler to Instagram on iOS) and I was inspired to try again that night, but I had no luck. I even found and attempted to modify the same instructions.
I decided to call it quits, and then a few weeks later with a bit of a grudge, I spontaneously tried again and I had it done in about 30 minutes after finding the sandbox function.
If I end up in the same arena I think I’ll look for debugging code next. I love certificate pinning as a user, but as a forensic analyst I fucking loath it.
Cert pinning pretty much serves to protect companies from people reversing their protocols and little else imo.
https://sslmate.com/resources/certificate_authority_failures
From a pure security perspective, why trust someone you don’t have to trust? The web PKI CA bundle is great for cases where it’s hard to have a unique trust root for your application - like you’re running in a browser with no privileges - but if you’re distributing code then you’ve already solved that problem.
Managed well, it should be completely transparent to users as well. Managed poorly and it can be catastrophic (your app is dead until users upgrade it).