My journey on using the hidden Airbnb API and writing my first Electron application

A few weeks ago, I had the idea of creating a Google Map with a marker for each of my previous Airbnb trip. Simple and nice idea, right? As a developer, I thought that it would be great to just find a way to fetch the data of my previous trips. Then, I had a lot of other ideas and statistics to calculate with just this personal data… For example it would be great to have the total amount of money spent on the platform, the total number of days spent in an Airbnb, split that data by years… Too many cool ideas to achieve with just the data of my previous trips! I began looking for an official Airbnb API but I quickly realised there is not any…

If you search online a bit like I did, you’ll find some unofficial documentation and some drafts of libraries and adapters in several programming languages, but nothing really maintained or serious.

That’s when I tried to find a way to spy on the calls the Airbnb Android application was making. I managed to do that using Man in the Middle Proxy (mitmproxy). The technique is to use Transparent Proxying and connect both your computer and smartphone to the same Wifi, but changing your smartphone Wifi settings to use your computer as the gateway…