Free 9GAG image downloader for Android
It was inspired by a friend yesterday. He complained about how hard downloading images from 9GAG is, especially from a smartphone, where the developer tools are unavailable in the browser and you can’t find the original image URL, so he was ending up with a downloaded .webp image that he had to convert to .png using another app.
But the struggle continues. He told me that it’s almost impossible to create a 9GAG bot because 9GAG was taking the bot traffic very seriously and that they had various ways of detecting this kind of traffic and blocking it – usually with a captcha.
The last claim intrigued me.
What kind of security do they have? Is it true that a bot can’t navigate through 9GAG’s pages?
This sounds like a nice little challenge to me!
So I rolled up my sleeves and started digging deeper into the website, trying to figure out what is going on. The truth is that they do have a bot detecting service/tool, but it’s far from perfect and I really don’t believe that it will be able to block any well-written bot.
My research took about 1.5 hours and the approach that would allow me to get my bot navigating around the website and scrape the right links was already in my head.
Next step – the Free 9GAG image downloader for Android.
Lately, I started experimenting with Flutter(and I really love it so far), so it was a matter of 1 more hour to align a basic UI and implement the business logic of the application.
The result? A fully functioning free 9GAG image downloader for Android with a basic UI.
The application does its job very well and will download the original image from 9GAG, as long as viewing the post doesn’t require any authorization(for example NSFW posts).
A quick peek screenshot:
As always, you can contact me at any time by using this contact form.
Application Icon credits:
Image icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
Thanks for the great article!