De-compiling Android Application
All applications for Android phones are distributed as APK Files. These files contain all the source,UI , images and other media necessary to run the application on your phone.
The decompilation process isn’t perfect and the code you get won’t reflect the original code 100%. Things like variable names, loop structures and anonymous inner classes might be interpreted differently especially if the application will obfuscate your code.
- Getting the APK File
- Download the apk file from net of fetch it from the android phone
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This command gives the list of installed apk files with associated path
adb shell pm list packages -f -3
- This command will get the apk file on the PC
adb pull /data/app/programming.apk
- Change file extension to .zip
cp programming.apk programming.zip
- Extract the contents of the file
unzip programming.zip
- Decompiling the code
- Download dex2jar utility
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Get the classes.dex file unzipped contents
${PATH}/dex2jar/d2j-dex2jar.sh classes.dex
This will convert the dex to jar file and output will result in classes_dex2jar.jar file.
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Open decompiler gui and open the jar file
For Lyuten type the commandjava -jar luyten.jar
you will be able to view all the sources of project,external jar files etc.
- Save the source file
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Select option File -> Save All Sources This will save all the files on the file system.
At this point the sources have been decompiled but not the resources etc
- Decompiling Resources
- Download the latest version of apktool which is a tool for reverse engineering APK files. This tool dissassembles the code in Smali format along with resources . We will user only resources obtained from this utility as java file had been obtained from earlier approach.
java -jar apktool_2.0.0rc4.jar d programming.apk
This will create programming folder containing source and resource files
At this point we have recovered both the source and resource files.