(Q) Decompile an apk using phone?

[Guest the_crevis]

Hi, does anybody know of a way to decompile an apk using an android phone?

Thanks,

Ben.

[Guest t0mm13b]

Hi, does anybody know of a way to decompile an apk using an android phone?

Thanks,

Ben.

Depends on the ROM version, and what you intend to achieve by doing that? If you're talking about the various stock apks, it would IMHO be better to compile from the source tree, a lá AOSP, CM7. Bear in mind you do not need to rebuild the entire source from scratch. You can most certainly compile a singular apk by doing this,

make some_apk

That is dependant on the following:

. build/envsetup.sh

lunch

:)

If its a apk that is from the market, well.. apk's are zip files really, just unzip it, run baksmali against the classes.dex. Then again, knowledge of smali code is essential. But then again, why would you want to reverse engineer an apk from the market?

Google "android cracking" if you want to get at the actual understanding of reverse engineering an apk.

[Guest the_crevis]

Thanks very much for the reply, some interesting info, what I really want is a way to convert the apk binary xml files into standard xml files using my phone so I edit them on the go when i don't have access to a computer.

[Guest t0mm13b]

Thanks very much for the reply, some interesting info, what I really want is a way to convert the apk binary xml files into standard xml files using my phone so I edit them on the go when i don't have access to a computer.

AFAIK, the binary xml files are one-way at build time, that is, from plain xml to binary, unless somebody corrects me... :)