Comments moved to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623</a>.
(Reposting my comment here from the other thread)<p>AFAIK, reverse engineering APIs isn’t illegal. [1]<p>There are some (VC backed) start ups that are open about doing it. Teller API is an example. [2]<p>[1] “Reverse engineering generally doesn't violate trade secret law because it is a fair and independent means of learning information, not a misappropriation. Once the information is discovered in a fair and honest way, it also can be reported without violating trade secret law.“ <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq</a>
[2] “We reverse engineer these apps to discover their secret API contracts and then implement clients for them.” <a href="https://teller.io/" rel="nofollow">https://teller.io/</a>
Oops, didn’t see main thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623</a>