CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidpackagingandroid-manifestapk
IO-
IO-

Reputation: 211

Parse versionCode from android apk files

I know .apk files are .zip files, but AndroidManifest.xml looks binary and certainly grep or hex editors haven't been successful extracting the versionCode.

Does anybody know how to parse or extract it? I find myself in a Python script with the apks AndroidManifest.xml file open.

Upvotes: 21

Views: 8473

Answers (4)

Dong Liu
Dong Liu

Reputation: 43

You may refer to this. It reads necessary strings from the resource table while translating the binary xml file.

Upvotes: 1

user1402012
user1402012

Reputation: 361

Assuming you have the Android SDK installed, you can use aapt to find this value. For example, on Linux:

aapt dump badging MyAwesomeApplication.apk |grep version

Upvotes: 35

Juuso Ohtonen
Juuso Ohtonen

Reputation: 9662

Use android-apktool:

apktool.bat d application.apk

Upvotes: 2

Jason LeBrun
Jason LeBrun

Reputation: 13293

they are binary XML files. You can use a tool like AXML2XML to convert the binary XML file into a text-based XML file. There a few different tools, some do better jobs than others.

AXML2XML: http://devtcg.blogspot.com/2008/03/tool-to-read-android-binary-xml-files.html

AXMLPrtiner: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=514412

Upvotes: 3

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