Hung Truong: The Blog!

Reverse Engineering Quibi: Protocol Buffers and HLS Streaming

I’ve had a lot of free time in the past few weeks so I decided to spend some of it working on side projects. I really enjoy reverse engineering apps, so I decided to take a look at Quibi.

Quibi (short for “Quick Bites”) is a video streaming app/service that has a bunch of shows that are short. The idea is that you can sit on a bus ride and consume an episode or two, depending on how long your commute is. One of the constraints of the platform is that you can only watch these videos on a phone or tablet with the app installed.

Since everyone is stuck indoors for a while this constraint is kinda stupid and most people would probably like to watch their videos on their big tv rather than huddle around a phone, which is what Emily and I had to do to watch that stupid viral show about the terrible wife with the golden arm.

Anyway, I had an idea to write a tvOS app that would work with Quibi, so you could watch your terrible shows on your tv. Here’s what I learned trying to reverse engineer the Quibi app.

Cloning Zwift on iOS Part 4: Workout View

I haven’t been working as much on my workout app since it’s been good enough for me to use as a replacement for Zwift with the most recent changes I wrote about.

I got a new iPhone so I had to build and install the app on my phone again, and after firing up Xcode I decided to go ahead and add a few more things that I was meaning to add to the app. The app hasn’t had a good visualization of workouts so I ended up creating an interface for that.

Introducing BarkMode: Bark Detection + Dark Mode

I was in California about a month ago for work and I was able to attend a few events during WWDC week. I read a lot about the new features and APIs but didn’t really have a lot of time to mess with stuff like SwiftUI, etc. I got a stupid idea for a project but I didn’t really take the time to work on it until this weekend. Now I’d like to introduce you to my latest app: Bark Mode!

Cloning Zwift on iOS Part 3: HealthKit and a WatchOS App!

I’ve been a bit slow to update my blog series about trying to make a clone of Zwift, but not because I’ve stopped working on it. Rather, I’ve been able to use the “MVP” of what I’ve built so far in parts 1 and 2, and I was finding that the time I spent working on my app could be used actually working out. Like, I literally would write an implementation of something, but it would take so much of my time that I couldn’t test it out and I’d have to go to bed… Still, I was missing a few important features in my app, so I’ve been slowly working on them in between working on my fitness.

Making an iOS Zwift Clone to Save $15 a Month! Part 2: Reverse Engineering a Workout

Last time, on “Making an iOS Zwift Clone to Save $15 a Month” I wrote about learning Core Bluetooth to connect to my exercise bike and get data streaming directly to my app.

Since writing that article, I cleaned up the implementation of the Core Bluetooth service a bit and started supporting some additional data like distance, calories burned and cycling cadence.

While cycling on my exercise bike and staring at these numbers is fun, the built-in screen on my bike already shows these numbers, so I essentially recreated a subset of the official ergData app so far.

I realized the next challenge would be to start a guided workout in my app and show the target wattage alongside my actual wattage on the bike.