Reverse Engineering Boost Commerce for Mobile Without Documentation

The Problem: No Mobile Documentation

When rebuilding Shop Suki’s mobile app, we needed to integrate Boost Commerce—a popular Shopify plugin for search. It worked great on the web. On mobile? Boost Commerce had zero mobile documentation.

Here’s the challenge: Shopify plugins assume a browser and an HTML page. We were building a native Flutter app. The web SDK couldn’t help us. The mobile SDK didn’t exist—because mobile wasn’t supposed to be supported.

But we needed search-as-you-type powered by Boost Commerce on mobile.

So we reverse engineered it.

The Approach: Network Inspection

How do you integrate a tool with no documentation?

Here’s what worked:

Step 1: Open Developer Tools in the Browser

Load the Shopify store that uses Boost Commerce. Open Chrome DevTools → Network tab.

Step 2: Watch the Network Requests

Type in the search box. Watch what requests fire.

You’ll see:

• Request URL
• Request method (GET, POST, etc.)
• Headers being sent
• Query parameters
• Response format (JSON, XML, etc.)

This tells you the API contract without reading a single line of documentation.

Step 3: Understand the API Contract

From the network logs, extract:

• Endpoint URL: Where is the request going?
• Authentication: Is there an API key in headers? Query params?
• Request payload: What data is being sent?
• Response structure: What does the JSON look like?

For Boost Commerce, we found:

• A public search endpoint
• Query parameters for search terms and filters
• JSON response with product data matching Shopify’s structure

Step 4: Implement in Flutter

Once you understand the contract, implement it in your mobile app:

// Reverse-engineered Boost Commerce search implementation
class BoostCommerceService {
  final String apiEndpoint;
  final String shopId;

  Future<List<Product>> search(String query) async {
    final response = await http.get(
      Uri.parse('$apiEndpoint/search').replace(
        queryParameters: {
          'q': query,
          'shop_id': shopId,
          // Other params observed from network logs
        },
      ),
    );

    if (response.statusCode == 200) {
      final data = json.decode(response.body);
      return data['products'].map((p) => Product.fromJson(p)).toList();
    }

    throw Exception('Search failed');
  }
}

Step 5: Build Fallbacks and Monitoring

This approach is fragile. Boost Commerce could change their API anytime without warning.

We built safeguards:

1. Fallback to Shopify native search: If Boost Commerce fails, use Shopify’s built-in search
2. Monitoring: Log when Boost Commerce requests fail so we’d know immediately if it broke
3. Error handling: Graceful degradation instead of crashes

Future<List<Product>> searchWithFallback(String query) async {
  try {
    return await boostCommerceService.search(query);
  } catch (e) {
    // Log the failure for monitoring
    logger.error('Boost Commerce search failed', error: e);

    // Fallback to Shopify native search
    return await shopifyService.search(query);
  }
}

So… is this hacky or smart?

This is the kind of engineering that doesn’t go in your resume—it’s too hacky.

But it ships.

And sometimes shipping beats being elegant.

Here’s the reality:

• Elegant solution: Wait for Boost Commerce to release mobile documentation (could be months or never)
• Hacky solution: Reverse engineer it, ship search-as-you-type in days, monitor for breakage

We chose shipping. Users got a working search feature. If it broke, we had fallbacks.

When This Approach Works

Reverse engineering APIs makes sense when:

1. The service is already integrated on web: You’re not hacking into something private—you’re just observing public requests
2. You have fallbacks: If it breaks, you don’t break your users’ experience
3. You monitor for changes: You catch breakage quickly
4. Time-to-market matters: Waiting for official support isn’t an option

This doesn’t work when:

• The API is private and access-controlled
• You can’t build fallbacks
• The service actively prevents this (rate limiting, API keys rotated frequently, etc.)

Lessons Learned

1. Browser DevTools are your friend: Most web plugins expose their API contracts in network requests
2. Document what you reverse engineer: Write down the API contract you discovered—you’ll need it when debugging later
3. Fallbacks are non-negotiable: Never rely solely on reverse-engineered APIs
4. Monitoring matters: You need to know when things break
5. Shipping beats perfection: Sometimes hacky solutions are the pragmatic choice

Related Projects

This reverse engineering work was part of the Shop Suki mobile app rebuild, where we took the app from 3.x to 4.4/4.7 stars by rebuilding from scratch with speed and quality.

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Thank you for reading!