How is it done?

[Puddy Tat]

I looked all over for what appeared to be the best location for this thread and ended up here. Move if it should go elsewhere.
.
You have a word document you need to change a date in the doc. So you go to your laptop or desktop, open word, load the file, change the date, save and close. Done.
But what if you wanted to add something to an app. Lets say a date or a number somewhere out of the way on a page of the app. Would the information as to how to do something like this require months of learning programming and fill up a book or would it be really simple?

 

[Medion]

I looked all over for what appeared to be the best location for this thread and ended up here. Move if it should go elsewhere.
.
You have a word document you need to change a date in the doc. So you go to your laptop or desktop, open word, load the file, change the date, save and close. Done.
But what if you wanted to add something to an app. Lets say a date or a number somewhere out of the way on a page of the app. Would the information as to how to do something like this require months of learning programming and fill up a book or would it be really simple?

If the application is open source, you can go to the developer's repository (GITHUb is popular for this), find the line that you want to change, and recompile when done. If it's a closed-source app, you have to reverse engineer it. The legality of this will be based on the licensing terms set by the distributor of the app. If it's a paid app, it's pretty much illegal. However, just because an app is free doesn't make this legal, as the application could be using in-app purchases for advertising to generate revenue.

Bottom line is that if the app isn't open source, it's likely not legal to modify it in this way.