Computer Whiz Reverse-Engineers McDonald’s App to Track Ice Cream
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You're randomly passing by McDonald's on a hot day with the sun on top of you, burning your head, showering in your own sweat. And caramel sundae seems to be just the thing to cool you down. You get into McDonald's' and find out that the ice cream machine is broken, as always.
And there is this website that will save you from thinking whether every McDonald's ice cream machine turns out to be broken on purpose.
The recently launched McBroken is a website that shows you the ice cream available stores. It is obviously a reversed-engineered marvel, from McDonald's' current mobile shopping app.
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Rashiq Zahid created an application programming interface that adds a McSundae from McDonald's stores every 30 minutes. The moment the bot adds the McSundae to the shopping cart, it informs McBroken, meaning, the store's ice cream machine is working. And the exact store you're looking for to get some ice cream turns green on the website.
I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine https://t.co/2KsRwAdrMd
— rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
“I love poking around in different apps and just looking at the security features and the internal APIs,” Zahid told The Verge.
He might have been the most disturbed person ever by the loss of a McDonald's product. And what he did definitely impressed some top executives of the brand.
McDonald’s' VP of U.S. Communications, David Tovar, tweeted “Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream!” after having found out about the website.
Currently, 10.25% of the stores are not available to provide you with some ice cream across the U.S. And most of the available stores are located in Chicago with a percentage of 15.38.
"No order gets executed, no ice cream is actually wasted," Zahid concludes.
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