hearsilent/apk-parser

apk-parser

Apk parser for java/Android, forked from here after fixing some issues in it and collecting some fixes from others :

https://github.com/hsiafan/apk-parser

Why use this library, as we can do it using the Android framework instead?

While the Android framework is more official and should work better in most cases, there are multiple reasons to use this library :

1. Can handle APK files that are not on the file system. The Android framework requires you to use a file path, always.
2. Can handle split APK files too. The Android framework can only handle the base ones or stand-alone files.
3. Can find some APK properties that aren't available on older Android versions.
4. While the Android framework is technically open sourced, it has various things that are protected and can't be reached, and also hard to import as your own code.

Usage in gradle file

https://jitpack.io/#AndroidDeveloperLB/apk-parser/

Known issues and notes

• The sample app shows that in some rare cases of APK files, you can't get the app-icon. Sometimes it's some invalid "bmp" file. Sometimes it's some XML file. And other weird cases. Same goes for app-names (labels). I hope that some day it could be fixed. The good news is that usually this happens for system apps only. Reported here: AndroidDeveloperLB#2 AndroidDeveloperLB#3
• Very rare issue too is that there are some parsing issues that need to be handled as the library parsing capability hasn't been updated for a long time. An example for this is when parsing the app with package name , as it has "ParserException: Unexpected chunk Type: 0x206" . While this is quite rare and usually happens for system apps, it is very important that such things will get updated. Reported here: AndroidDeveloperLB#1
• The entire code is in Java. I personally prefer Kotlin. I hope one day the whole library would be in Kotlin. At the very least, we should have a clear understanding for everything, if it's nullable or not. This needs to be carefully done and without ruining the performance and memory usage of the library.
• Could be nice to have better optimization in memory usage and speed, because somehow the framework seems to be more efficient on both. I think a better optimization is needed. Maybe some sort of way to tell exactly what we want to get out of it, it would minimize such memory usage.