Extracting manifest info from an APK file

7/2/2015

If you ever need to extract information from a APK's manifest file (e.g. to get the name of the launch activity),

You can use Android application packaging tool (AAPT) found under the build-tools folder under your Android SDK installation

$ aapt dump --values xmltree <name>.apk AndroidManifest.xml

and then you have to parse the output to find needed info. The output is a little "rough" but usable.

The parts in bold above are fixed/required. The "<name>.apk" is the name of the APK file from which you're extracting the manifest.

You probably want to redirect the output to a local file to have for future reference, since the line above just outputs to the screen. So...for example

C:\Eclipse_ADT\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20140702\sdk\build-tools\17.0.0> aapt dump --values xmltree <app-name>.apk AndroidManifest.xml > C:\temp\app-name_Manifest.txt

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Unless stated otherwise, everything discussed herein is related to development I've done on semi custom hardware, (Freescale-based, derived from a FS reference platform) with a rooted BSP/OS (also based on a Freescale reference build). I have not built the BSP (nor have I ever built a BSP)

Author

John Goluch has been a software developer since 1989. He has developed code for a variety of embedded systems in Assembly and C, for the web in HTML/JS/PHP, and mobile devices in Qt/C++ and Android/Java. Content here comes from "in the weeds" level of research and discovery related to Android development