TikTok's private mobile API, taken apart.
hashfunction reverse-engineers TikTok's private mobile API and crawls it at billion scale. The teardowns, the datasets, and thetool that does it all live here.
Scraping TikTok's Mobile API
The full write-up: how TikTok signs its private mobile API, device registration and activation, the X-Argus / X-Ladon cipher stack, TLS fingerprinting, and the 24 endpoints it opens up.
Read →Scraping 3 billion TikTok profiles (and what's actually in them)
A run through the shape of the dataset: 3.1 billion unique creators, how many clear the 1k-follower line, and where they are in the world.
Read →How TikTok's X-Argus request signing works
The header that gates the mobile API: a protobuf sealed with two layers of Simon/Speck and SM3. What it contains and why a wrong one returns an empty 200.
Read →Where TikTok hides the creator's country
The profile endpoint returns no region. The author object on a post looks like it should, but it's empty. The country is there, one level up.
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