Documentation about the compressed AndroidManifest.xml file format

Question

I am looking for information about how the AndroidManifest.xml is encoded within an apk file.

In fact, this file is compressed in a specific format by aapt before being stored in the apk file.

I could try to reverse the format by looking into aapt source code, but maybe there is already some documentation around.

Thanks

Answer 1

It's Android binary XML. For what it's worth, resource XML files are also compiled to this binary form before packaging to the APK.

To decode it, you can use the axml library.