Snaprecovery: Recover old Snaps that have “disappeared” from Snapchat

Snapchat is user disempowerment patterns taken to their logical conclusion: The developer has full access to all their data, while the users have none.<p>The other big players have been moving in that direction, making it less and less accessible and exportable, but Snap takes the cake.

&gt;We don&#x27;t need any forensics tools. We can simply use adb pull to fetch the files because they are never deleted. But once you logout from the app and after Snapchat deletes the Snaps, you will need the right forensics tools to recover the files.<p>This feels like a bug, no? I don&#x27;t see any logical reason for Snapchat to keep the files around that long.

Last time I looked back in ~2016, Snapchat also persisted chat text contents in the Android app&#x27;s SQLite database even after the messages &quot;expired&quot;.

Does anyone else remember when it was possible to extract snapchat messages that haven&#x27;t been viewed yet because they had some ridiculously easy to find encryption key, hardcoded in the app? It was found running &#x27;strings&#x27; and trying each one for the key and boom, one little script and you could just do this really easy for a long time even after knowledge of how to do it had been made public. This was so long ago, not sure what they did to change this at all -- No surprise at all they don&#x27;t random-out the files here.

This is neat but I suspect its practical value isn&#x27;t that high. The type of people who want permanent access to incoming snaps just run screen recorder software.