CODEWITHSUNDEEP
android
Felipe Calderon
Felipe Calderon

Reputation: 695

How and where is Application executable code stored inside a device?

Exactly where inside the data/data/myapp/... is executable code stored? And how is it stored, is it stored as dex code?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4304

Answers (2)

pelotasplus
pelotasplus

Reputation: 10062

Starting with

where

Connect to your device with adb and the run pm path here-goes-package-name command. Like this:

$ adb shell
root@vbox86p:/ # pm path pl.pelotasplus.wptv
package:/data/app/pl.pelotasplus.wptv-1/base.apk

This will be a path to .apk on your device.

Some apps, like system apps, are in /system/app directory or even /system/priv-app/.

root@vbox86p:/data # pm path com.google.android.partnersetup
package:/system/priv-app/GooglePartnerSetup/GooglePartnerSetup.apk

and answering second part of your question

how

They are just .apk files, which are basically a ZIP files. So if you use unzip -l command you will see that the code of your app is kept in .dex file inside above mentioned .apk file

root@vbox86p:/data # unzip -l /system/priv-app/GooglePartnerSetup/GooglePartnerSetup.apk | grep .dex   <
276104  08-21-08 17:13   classes.dex

Sometimes there can be more than one .dex files -- welcome to the Multi-Dex world!

cache

There is also something called dalvik cache, where .dex files are kept for performance reasons.

root@vbox86p:/ # ls -al ./data/dalvik-cache/x86/data@[email protected]@[email protected]
rw-r--r-- system   all_a102  4690352 2015-05-31 20:17 data@[email protected]@[email protected]

Upvotes: 4

frogatto
frogatto

Reputation: 29285

Where?

System preset apps are in /system/app. Ordinary apps are in /data/app. They are stored as .apk files which are of type simple ZIP files. .dex files also can be accessed by unzipping them. The name of that .dex file is classes.dex.

How?

Whenever you install a new app, Android simplely copy that APK file there. Moreover, in ART, Android also compiles application byte codes to native device codes and save these codes somewhere.

Unlike Dalvik, ART introduces the use of ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation by compiling entire applications into native machine code upon their installation.

How can I access there?

By ADB (Android Debug Bridge) you can access Android file system.

Upvotes: 1

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