We agreed not to date, so why are you crying now that I've become the richest man?

Meanwhile, in Yanjing, a thousand miles away, it was just past 10 p.m.

Yanjing, Tsinghua Science Park, Innovation Works office area.

Only the meeting room of the Green Bean Pod project team on the entire office building was still lit by a stark, glaring fluorescent light.

"Snapped!"

A thick stack of thirty-page reports on user churn was slammed onto the long conference table, the papers scattering and sliding into the hands of several key executives.

Wang Junhua, the person in charge of Green Bean Pod, braced his hands on the table, his eyes behind his glasses were bloodshot, and his chest was heaving violently.

"Can someone explain to me why, in just eight hours since 2 PM, our new user growth on the PC platform has plummeted by half, and existing active users are uninstalling the client at a rate of thousands per hour?!"

The meeting room was completely silent, and the ashtrays were piled high with cigarette butts lying haphazardly.

The operations manager swallowed hard, his fingers gripping a loosely stacked report page, his voice trembling:

"Junhua, this afternoon, Temple Run and Angry Sparrow launched full-screen pop-ups. Starting at 8 PM tonight, Xingchen App Market has triggered a second wave of pop-ups in the forums and QQ groups of various universities."

"College students these days don't even need to connect their phones to computers with data cables anymore. They just install Star Market on their phones, and it installs silently with a single click, without even a system confirmation dialog box popping up. Many long-time users are posting on forums saying that since it can be done with one click on the phone, keeping the Green Bean app on the computer is just taking up hard drive space..."

"That's enough!"

Wang Junhua raised his hand to interrupt him, his back teeth aching from clenching them.

Of course he knew the reason.

Using a PC driver to install a mobile device silently without requiring root privileges is like using a broadsword and spear to fight a heavy machine gun – a massacre of a generational difference.

Wang Junhua turned his head, his gaze fixed on the three low-level system architects sitting to his right:

"Old Zhou, I told you guys to download the Star Market installation package at 2 PM this afternoon and reverse engineer it. It's past 10 PM now, eight hours have passed, have you extracted the core code for that permission-free installation yet?!"

The chief architect, known as Lao Zhou, was in his thirties with a high hairline, and his forehead was covered in fine beads of cold sweat.

In front of him were two high-end business laptops, their screens filled with hexadecimal code boxes from decompilation tools.

"Junhua, we're just missing the last dynamic library layer. The three of us are mounting a debugger to forcibly unpack it..."

"I don't care what methods you use!"

Wang Junhua grabbed the mug on the table and slammed it down, spilling coffee onto the surface.

"No one is allowed to leave this door tonight! Before dawn, we must expose their silent installation logic completely! We'll release an update patch first thing tomorrow morning! If Star Market gets this feature exclusive for more than three days, they'll have ingrained this habit with all Android users, and then we'll all be fired!"

"Understood! We'll use brute force to break through the weak points!"

Old Zhou gritted his teeth, turned around, and simultaneously placed his fingers on the keyboard along with the other two architects.

The only sounds in the conference room were the rapid clatter of keyboards and the roar of the computer fan.

Time ticked by, and the hands of the wall clock slid past 10:15 p.m.

Old Zhou's eyes widened as he stared at the screen, his fingers slowed down as he typed, finally stopping at the Enter key.

"Beep..."

The laptop suddenly emitted a short beep, and the debugging window that was scrolling through the compiled code turned into a glaring blood-red error message box. A series of random garbled characters filled up the memory cache, and the entire decompilation software froze and crashed on the spot.

The two architects next to them also let out a low cry at the same time. The connected test phone froze and went black on the spot, and the debugging terminal on the computer became unresponsive, with bright red memory overflow error boxes popping up all over the screen.

"What's going on?!"

Wang Junhua, who had been standing behind and staring intently at the screen, felt a sinking feeling in his heart and stepped forward to press down on Lao Zhou's shoulder.

Sweating profusely, Lao Zhou took off his black-rimmed glasses and tossed them onto the keyboard. As if all his strength had been drained, he slumped back in his swivel chair and shook his head at Wang Junhua.

"I can't find it... Don't bother trying, it's impossible to copy."

"What do you mean it's impossible to copy?!"

Wang Junhua's voice cracked, "Everyone's doing Android development based on an open-source kernel, how could he possibly write some kind of cryptic book?!"

Old Zhou gave a wry smile, pointed to the monitor that had just closed the error message and restored the desktop, his tone full of frustration at being outmatched:

"Junhua, the person who wrote this underlying architecture is a true top-tier hacker."

"He wrote all the privilege escalation logic in the lowest-level programming language and encapsulated it directly in an encrypted dynamic link library. He then wrapped it with four layers of dynamic obfuscation shells, and the function names were all randomly generated gibberish."

"The most deadly thing is that he planted an anti-debugging self-destruct trap at the bottom layer! As soon as an external debugger hook is detected trying to track a memory address, the internal logic lock will directly trigger an infinite loop, and incidentally fill the registers with fake garbage instructions. When we forcibly set a breakpoint, all we got was fake code that he deliberately spat out. The real code was already self-destructed and cleared from memory within 0.1 seconds of triggering the debug!"

The air in the meeting room froze.

Several key technical personnel looked at each other, a chill running down their spines.

In 2010, when even the basic control items of Android were not fully understood in China, the other party not only wrote a permission-free silent installation, but also conveniently set up a military-grade low-level decompilation moat.

This is not even a contest on the same level.

In the silence, the product manager, sitting in the corner, swallowed hard and tentatively spoke in a low voice:

"Junhua, since we can't catch up technically in the short term, how about... we hire a PR firm to contact a group of online trolls and post on the JiFeng and Android forums tonight, saying that Xingchen Market can bypass system permissions because it actually has a Trojan horse installed in the background that steals privacy and maliciously charges fees? Let's scare the users and slow down their growth..."

"Absolutely not!"

Before Wang Junhua could speak, the technical director next to him slammed his fist on the table and rejected the idea, his face turning ashen as he glared at the product manager:

"Are you crazy? This morning, the moderator 'JiGe' and several tech gurus on JiFeng.com used professional packet sniffing tools to test all the inbound and outbound traffic of Xingchen Market, and even posted a complete screenshot of the purity verification in the pinned post!"

"Furthermore, I just checked the forum. Five minutes ago, a dozen or so alt accounts were spamming 'Starry Sky Deducting Fees Trojan' in the comments section of a post. In less than thirty seconds, the official Starry Sky account released the software's underlying digital signature certificate, official original verification code, and all-green security reports from five major domestic and international authoritative antivirus engines. They also dug up the posting addresses of those dozen or so alt accounts and posted them on the second floor. They all came from the same data center in southern China! Right now, the geeks on the forum are using those addresses to dox the company that bought the spammers. If we go up there to throw dirty water now, it's like offering our faces to be slapped in the face in public!"

Upon hearing this, the product manager shrank back and didn't dare utter another word.