What this is, in three sentences. Turkey runs its entire justice system on one closed-source, government-mandated editor and its proprietary .udf format — and on Apple Silicon Macs it was barely usable. I rebuilt it from the outside: reverse-engineering the obfuscated binary with Claude Code as a debugging partner, and shipping twenty fixes — from a native Apple-Silicon runtime to a full dark mode. No source code, no vendor cooperation, no replacing the format you're legally required to use.
1. The problem
In Turkey you cannot file anything with the courts except through UYAP, the Ministry of Justice's digital backbone, in its proprietary UDF format — a signed zip that nothing else opens. The only official tool is the UYAP Document Editor, an aging Java desktop app. The captive audience is enormous and has no exit: 206,678 lawyers, ~25,000 judges and prosecutors, tens of thousands of courthouse clerks and court-appointed expert witnesses, plus millions of citizens. Nobody chose this format, and nobody can opt out of it.
2. What people actually live with
On a modern Mac, the official build limps along under Rosetta translation — slow to open, sluggish to use, text rendered soft and blurry, ⌘-shortcuts dead, Turkish letters (ğ ş ı İ) silently dropped from exported PDFs, and dictation that deletes your paragraph and freezes the app. So people improvise: forum threads full of lawyers who "struggled for weeks" or were "about to switch to Windows"; the official iOS companion sitting at 2.0★; an entire folklore of reinstalling Intel Java, deleting hidden config files, exporting to PDF just to print, or paying for web converters. Many simply keep a second Windows machine around to do the one thing their government requires.
Same document, same Retina screen — the official build versus this rebuild (sharp, native). It follows the system appearance, so dark and light both look clean.
3. What I did with Claude Code
The editor is closed and obfuscated — no source, classes named aF and hj — so everything happened from the outside: build-time bytecode patches and runtime Java agents. The work was a human-plus-AI loop: I formed the hypotheses and kept the judgment (helped by having already reverse-engineered the format once myself, in my open-source UDF-Toolkit), while Claude Code read the mountains of disassembly and pixel measurements and proposed the next falsifiable test. The result is twenty fixes across three fronts: making it run native and sharp on Apple Silicon (its own embedded runtime instead of Rosetta, crisp Retina text); making it behave like a Mac app (real ⌘-shortcuts, native file dialogs, a flat Word-2026 look with proper dark mode); and fixing what was broken or lossy (smart-card signing, correct Turkish PDFs, the dictation crash, rich paste from Word and Pages). Work that used to need a specialist and a clear month — which usually meant it never got done at all.
4. What comes next
Clunky, mandated technologies like this used to be effectively untouchable: the people who felt the pain and the people who could fix it were rarely the same people. That is changing. Software that doesn't serve the humans forced to use it will now be retrofitted and reclaimed from the outside — whether the institutions shipping it cooperate or not.
Independent, unofficial macOS patch — not endorsed by any public institution; the user downloads the official package and patches it locally. Full write-up with all sources: github.com/saidsurucu/ude-mac-arm64.
