I should also probably make this in the form of an Xposed module. Do people even use Xposed any more?
In the context of JVM, obfuscation is an extra step where identifiers are renamed to various kinds of nonsense to make code more compact and supposedly hinder reverse engineering.
Java classes must still have names, and methods and fields must also retain type information for the JVM to work. Inside a JVM, classes and fields are accessed using names, and methods are accessed using name+signature, the signature being of the form "(Ljava/lang/String;II)V", that's a method that takes a string and two ints and returns void.
I personally just wear a black shirt and black pants almost every day, am not all that interested in fashion, and am a woman.
No, but it is the third option you ommited: mostly women (doing that).
I just scrolled through Instagram and I think they changed the ads. I still want to shoot myself, but I'm not getting any ads for weapons anymore
Anyway, at some point Instagram ads (especially the autoplaying video kind, with sound) drove me crazy enough that out came jadx and apktool and I found a beautiful way to inject my own code into Instagram's networking. The code I injected rewrites the API responses before the rest of the app sees them. I can now scroll through my feed without annoying salesmen begging for my attention. I've also enabled a "secret" debugging menu while at it, where there are manual overrides for server-side settings, and there are at least several hundred of them — it's a bit creepy what they're A/B testing, like slightly different wording or different button colors.
The only problem that still remains is that the feed is still algorithmic, and there's nothing that could be done with that with client patches.