REA use cases
Unofficial guide. This site is an independent community guide and is not affiliated with the REA project. For authoritative docs see the official REA website and the morluto/rea GitHub repository. Commands here are taken from the official README/docs (checked 2026-10-13); REA changes quickly, so verify against the official docs.
1. Understand a feature and rebuild it
The core workflow: ask your agent to investigate a feature in an app, see the evidence and build a similar feature in your project.
Understand how search works in the Notes app, show me the evidence, and build a
similar feature for my project.
2. Electron / JavaScript apps
Official showcase: tracing Notion's clipboard bridge from renderer API through preload and IPC into the main process (case study).
3. Native binary reconstruction
DX-Ball: following a sound call into its position-to-pan helper and turning pseudocode into C that passes 3,205 original-x86 cases (case study).
4. Retro / DOS games
TH04: recovering a PC-98 bullet-ring calculation from 16-bit instructions using Ghidra's DOS support (case study).
5. More targets
- Android APKs (with JADX) and devices (adb)
- .NET assemblies – metadata and CIL, static only
- Websites and saved HAR network captures
- Firmware (Binwalk/Unblob), Go binaries, WASM, EVM bytecode, Linux crash dumps
REA is intended for lawful research, education, interoperability, software preservation, and analysis of software you own or are authorized to examine.
FAQ
Can REA reverse engineer Electron apps?
Yes. analyze-javascript-application inspects an extracted app directory or ASAR and returns modules, imports and Electron boundaries.
Can REA analyze Android APKs?
Yes, with headless JADX and a full JDK on Linux/macOS/Windows x64.