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Compressed Resources (resources.arsc) Decompressor

First time poster, but long-time lurker and avid Android Developer here.
I'm putting the finishing touches on a tool that decompresses resource files (including the ARSC and any compressed XML files). It's something I sort of took interest in in my spare time, as a learning experience, and I think it would be helpful to the community. It could probably be used to make modifications to compressed layouts in a ROM, such as HTC Sense-based ROMs (decompress the resources, make edits, compress, sign...).
Anyways, I figured I'd ask first... does a tool like this already exist? If so, whatever, this was a learning experience anyways. If not, I'd like to get it out there for all of you geniuses to use.
I'd also like to know what kind of options might be good to have on this tool. Right now it's command-line-based (and might stay that way... I think a UI might be overkill). Let me know. I'll be watching!

That's great!
In which language is it written? Will you open-source it? If so, on which license?
I'm asking cause I need such tool for my Omnipatcher project and I intended to make it myself

Java. I'll probably open-source it once I clean it up enough. I mean, nothing's really a secret in there. I figured out everything I needed from the Android sources.
Brut.all said:
That's great!
In which language is it written? Will you open-source it? If so, on which license?
I'm asking cause I need such tool for my Omnipatcher project and I intended to make it myself
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

When?
When will you relase this?

Oh, good work!!!
Any news?

itanczos said:
Oh, good work!!!
Any news?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry guys, I'm really eager to get this out, I'm just struggling to pay the bills, too. I hesitate to make promises, but it should be out sometime this month. I'm just as excited as you probably are to use it. I can't wait to see what kind of themes/mods sprout up once you all get your hands on this.

That sound cool, I was also thinking in creating such a tool or maybe just a shell script that uses aapt to get all the infos and generate an xml out of it but if you already have something in the pipe for doing this... I hope it's finished (or better said at a release stage) soon.

rac2030 said:
That sound cool, I was also thinking in creating such a tool or maybe just a shell script that uses aapt to get all the infos and generate an xml out of it but if you already have something in the pipe for doing this... I hope it's finished (or better said at a release stage) soon.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doesn't aapt only compile the resources, and not the other way around? I didn't think aapt gave us all the information we needed to go back to the original XML.

binarybulge said:
Doesn't aapt only compile the resources, and not the other way around? I didn't think aapt gave us all the information we needed to go back to the original XML.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It has dump command and output looks like full XML data just in different (easy to parse) format:
Code:
N: android=http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android
E: manifest (line=44)
A: android:sharedUserId(0x0101000b)="com.google.android.apps.maps" (Raw: "com.google.android.apps.maps")
A: android:versionCode(0x0101021b)=(type 0x10)0xcf6
A: android:versionName(0x0101021c)="3.3.1" (Raw: "3.3.1")
A: package="com.google.android.apps.maps" (Raw: "com.google.android.apps.maps")
E: uses-sdk (line=54)
A: android:minSdkVersion(0x0101020c)=(type 0x10)0x4
E: uses-permission (line=58)
A: android:name(0x01010003)="android.permission.CALL_PHONE" (Raw: "android.permission.CALL_PHONE")

binarybulge said:
Doesn't aapt only compile the resources, and not the other way around? I didn't think aapt gave us all the information we needed to go back to the original XML.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Code:
aapt dump xmltree xxx.apk AndroidManifest.xml
This does output some sort of xml like output... at least as far I have analyzed the output, it should be possible with some parsing code to recover or better said reconstruct a working xml ;-)
Of course, just implementing a complete encoder/decoder would be a nicer solution and as you said, theoretically all the needed framework stuff is on git so it wouldn't be hard to implement it if you have time... I though that this was what you have done or not?

rac2030 said:
Code:
aapt dump xmltree xxx.apk AndroidManifest.xml
This does output some sort of xml like output... at least as far I have analyzed the output, it should be possible with some parsing code to recover or better said reconstruct a working xml ;-)
Of course, just implementing a complete encoder/decoder would be a nicer solution and as you said, theoretically all the needed framework stuff is on git so it wouldn't be hard to implement it if you have time... I though that this was what you have done or not?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haha, yeah it is what I have done. You guys just kind of worried me a little making me think I was reinventing the wheel.
aapt would have been one approach, but I'm still not sure it covers all bases. For example, the strings.xml, arrays.xml, etc files. Those obviously aren't handled the same as layout files. Their contents get compressed into the arsc file. I'm also handling some more complex cases, such as one package referencing drawables from another package.
My goal of course is to restore all input XML, including things like strings.xml, and all of those in various configuration-specific folders (orientation, locales, screen sizes...).

is there any public source of this Compressed Resources (resources.arsc) Decompressor?
i'd like to test it!

Hello Binarybulge!
News?

Is this dead or what?

I'm working on such tool on my own, have managed to decode XMLs (using Android source, not parsing aapt dumps) and now I know, what binarybulge was talking about:
binarybulge said:
aapt would have been one approach, but I'm still not sure it covers all bases. For example, the strings.xml, arrays.xml, etc files. Those obviously aren't handled the same as layout files. Their contents get compressed into the arsc file. I'm also handling some more complex cases, such as one package referencing drawables from another package.
My goal of course is to restore all input XML, including things like strings.xml, and all of those in various configuration-specific folders (orientation, locales, screen sizes...).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
binarybulge: please, let me know, whether you have quit, don't have time, died or what? Currently I'm working on decoding @ids and /res/values/ and I don't want to reinvent the wheel, if you have done this so far and just don't have time to continue your work.

I'm interested in pitching in. I want an easy tool for decoding a binary .xml file, edit it including adding new elements and then convert it back to binary xml.
I'm pretty familiar with Android low level stuff. One example of my work:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=5475283
If I can help in any way, let me know. I don't want to reinvent the wheel either.

jonasl said:
I'm interested in pitching in. I want an easy tool for decoding a binary .xml file, edit it including adding new elements and then convert it back to binary xml.
I'm pretty familiar with Android low level stuff. One example of my work:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=5475283
If I can help in any way, let me know. I don't want to reinvent the wheel either.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just for curiosity: how did you do it? Hex edited xml's and resources.arsc?
I'm still working on this tool and have made some progress

Everything that's been done on the keyboard linked above has been done in code. You of all people need no introduction to smail/baksmali
I've rewritten the configuration system (HTC's settings provider is missing in non sense roms), rewritten the parts that interfaces with google voice recognition service and some other tweaks, but it's all code mods.
To fix some remaining issues I must edit xml layouts. Just changing some color code etc. is doable in any hex editor, but adding and removing elements and attributes is kind of hard. I'm stuck at this point and was looking for a tool to convert own xml to binary xml. Since I didn't find such tool I was thinking about creating one and ran into this thread...

I've just successfully and fully automatically decoded all resources for simple HelloWorld apk, then edited them, packaged again using aapt and run on a device It's early alpha and is unusable for now cause it still doesn't support many types of resources, but I have a proof of concept, that it is possible to repackage resources

Brut.all said:
I've just successfully and fully automatically decoded all resources for simple HelloWorld apk, then edited them, packaged again using aapt and run on a device It's early alpha and is unusable for now cause it still doesn't support many types of resources, but I have a proof of concept, that it is possible to repackage resources
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yay! Cool! Waiting for release!
Greets!

How can I view the source code of an android app?

This is probably a noob question, but how can you view the coding of an android application? I just had a small test app developed for me and I would like to look at the "guts" of it.
I downloaded the emulator but I haven't been able to figure out how to see my app's code using it. Maybe there is another way that's easier? You know, something akin to the "view page source" tab enabled in many browsers that allows you to see an html page's code?
I tried opening it with TextEdit on my Mac but it says its not readable.
What's an easy way to take a look at/edit the code?
Thanks in advance for your help!

Android-apktool
Android-apktool - A tool for reengineering Android apk files ...
http: / / code.google.com/p/android-apktool
It is a tool for reengineering 3rd party, closed, binary Android apps. It can decode resources to nearly original form and rebuild them after making some modifications; it makes possible to debug smali code step by step. Also it makes working with app easier because of project-like files structure and automation of some repetitive tasks like building apk, etc.
It is NOT intended for piracy and other non-legal uses. It could be used for localizing, adding some features or support for custom platforms and other GOOD purposes. Just try to be fair with authors of an app, that you use and probably like.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Google "apk manager"
Sent from my DROIDX using XDA App

Thank guys, however it says it can't be found - see this screencast I recorded: screencast.com/t/kII8UcBqE1RQ
Any ideas?
I feel like it can't be that complicated, but there is almost no info about in on Google...

Project Cream (Beta)

Hello everybody,
I'm Alessandro and I'm a student in IT Security at University of Milan.
I'm doing a thesis about Android Malware and I'm building a system to automatize the analyze of every App in every Market.
This system use a lot of free opensource products that I'm trying to customize and integrate.
The base idea is to enumerate all App in every Market (offical and not), download every free app and get Apk, at this point there is a first step that involve our customized version of Androguard for static analysis, next step is an hybrid analysis in a customized Android running on emulator.
More in detail:
- We are trying to enumerate all App using Android market api code.google.com/p/android-market-api and we are currently at work
- We want to download every free App enumerated by previous step, I think is not possible to download directly Apk, so I assume that I must *download App in an emulator and save Apk by a backup utility, any suggest??
- Next step is to anakyze Apk with Androguard and publish report (MD5 of Apk, permission declared, services...) to Db - not yet started
- After androguard we have to install Apk in emulator running customized Android, and here we have a lot of difficulties.
First of all we want to install App silently, without human actions, this is not possible by default but did you think is possible to modify Android source code to allow this?
In addition I have built a customized kernel with SELinux support, next problem is that I have to add SELinux commands to BusyBox and cross-compile, anyone have already do this?
After that, we must create a scripts (maybe an App?) to run tcpdump and get suspect traffic data, get SELinux logs and made a sort of anomaly detection.
All this result must be sent to the same Db so we have a comparison between static and hybrid analysis for same App.
We are asking you a little help if anyone have already do one or more pieces of this system or if anyone wants to contribute in this project.
Thank you for all

[LIBRARY][ROOT][2.3+] AnJaRoot Library - No more scripting to utilize SuperUser!

AnJaRoot stands for Android Java Root, and it's just that - a replacement for the previous generation of supersuer access on Android. The days of calling su to execute scripts in a limited environment are over, developers are now able to perform previously restricted actions directly from Java!
This is the official Developer Support Thread for the AnJaRoot Library - Please focus your post on the Library, everything about the app should go here.
For more informations about AnJaRoot, please visit main thread or go to http://www.anjaroot.net/.
Getting Started
To start using the AnJaRoot Library, download it from the main thread or from the homepage. You will need the AnJaRoot-Library.jar, optionally also the provided JavaDoc jar. Integrate it as a dependency in your app and you are ready to go!
Resources
I'ts always easier to start with a sample and some documentation at hand. I've started the AnJaRootTester project to serve as a reference for the library usage as well as testing if AnJaRoot is correctly running and installed on a device. While it's not the cleanest app the world has ever seen, it shows pretty good how to integrate AnJaRoot into your app.
You may also like the online library documentation.
Feel free to post anything which is related to the library itself and happy hacking!

Luminger said:
AnJaRoot stands for Android Java Root, and it's just that - a replacement for the previous generation of supersuer access on Android. The days of calling su to execute scripts in a limited environment are over, developers are now able to perform previously restricted actions directly from Java!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nice! And very different from how I implemented Java code support in RootTools.
A question regarding your NOTES file: you write that setresuid() is inlined. Where is it inlined? If you use LD_PRELOAD, your own library will be hit first, and you can ask the compiler not to inline your code.

Yea, it turned out pretty simple I think
After reading the NOTES file again, I have to say that I was wrong on the comment placed there regarding inlines getresuid()/getresgid() calls.
You are right, your library will be hit first when it comes to external symbol resolve. But this only works for dynamically linked symbols, not for anything which is inlined or comming directly from the executable. I'm currently evaluating switching to ptrace() to place my capset() hook as it would interop with Xposed without it even knowing - so it may become obsolete soon anyway.
I can remember that I poked around in the compiled libraries pulled from my device, searching for external symbols I could replace. I looked at the wrong files and assumed that the compiler inlined those calls. Looking back this conclusion is so wrong, it would be awful if the compile would inline calls to shared library symbols

AnJaRoot 1.1.0 is now compatible with Xposed. It can be downloaded from http://anjaroot.net or the main AnJaRoot thread here at XDA.
You have to reinstall it via the provided update.zip to get Xposed compatibility. The library change is upward compatible, updating is recommended but not needed.

Wayland server for Android

ABANDONED
Hi! Does anyone here use Linux desktop distributions in chroot environment on Android device?
I am developing wayland protocol server for Android devices. If anyone is interested in checking my project, latest version of apk is always available here:
ftp://ftp.drivehq.com/mogryph/sparkle/
Currently I am only focused on running Xwayland as client. Also apk supports audio output.
Simplest instruction:
1. Android 6 or newer required, busybox required, root required
2. Prepare linux distribution in directory, image or on partition. Make sure you have Xwayland installed in it. Make sure you specify which DE to run (or at least xterm) in ~/.xinitrc
3. Install and start sparkle.apk
4. Press "edit user.sh", uncomment (remove #) line starting with start_generic_container. Change rest of this line to match your device:
first arg - image or partition where distribution is installed. If distribution is installed in directory and mouting is not needed, leave this arg unchanged.
second arg - mount point or directory with distribution. If you use mounting (first arg), this arg can be left unchanged.
third arg - name of the user which will be used to start Xwayland and DE. Its better to specify non-root. Also this is the user who must have .xinitrc in his home dir (see step 2).
5. Save user.sh and click "Start".
6. Any problems and crashes will be reflected in the log.
If you want audio output:
1. Compile and install driver from pcm_sparkle.tar.gz in your distribtion
2. cp 1.asoundrc ~/.asoundrc
If you have blinking problem, change upload_mode from 1 to 2 in settings. If you have bad performance, setting no_damage to true may help, but in most cases no_damage=false is better. Fastest upload mode is 0 (if it works).
If you don't trust me and don't want to give sparkle root permissions (I perfectly understand this) you don't have to. Also you can do without busybox.
But in this case, you need to understand and do a lot of things. Check sparkle's user.sh to get idea about what needs to be done. Basically:
1. You need to make /data/data/com.sion.sparkle/files accessible from inside chroot container. You can use bind bound.
2. Make sure you have tmpfs mounted over /tmp in container.
3. You may need to change selinux context on /tmp to match sparkle's context or disable SELinux.
4. You need to create new directory in /tmp, symlink sparkle's wayland socket from /data/data/com.sion.sparkle/files/wayland-0 to this dir. And export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to point to this dir. Dir must be (ch)owned by user who will be running Xwayland and DE.
5. After all this, you can try to start Xwayland and your DE.

new version
New version
rgho.st/8Fbz64Rxj
Added x86 and x86_64 support. Actually it is rewritten almost from scratch but x86 support is the only thing others can notice...

Hello! This project is interesting. I tried you app and it works on my Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X(chromium and glmark from chrooted environment works very well)! Can you publish source code on Github, because it really interesting project?

Also I'm interested, please post it on github!

Did you put this up on github or move this thread? Looks very interesting.

1
Argh, sorry, I decided to abandon this project. You are free to delete thread. Also no copyleft-licensed components were used so I don't have to bother releasing sources.

Hentacler said:
Argh, sorry, I decided to abandon this project. You are free to delete thread. Also no copyleft-licensed components were used so I don't have to bother releasing sources.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Check your PM please!

1
Hello again.
For last two weeks I was rewriting it from scratch (yes. again... yes, third time).
Probably need another week to make it stable.
Currently I am not sure it runs on any device except my own 5-year old phone (LineageOS 14).
I will maintain last version here:
ftp://ftp.drivehq.com/mogryph/sparkle/
There is no English documentation, but you can see script "user.sh" to get idea about how to start xwayland. In most cases it should be enough to edit few lines in that script to make it work on another device. If you execute this script on your device with "install" argument, it is supposed to place itself into sparkle's directory and sparkle is supposed to run it ("start" function) automatically. Sparkle doesn't request root unless script does.
Here is video of sparkle working:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOSFYxCF7Q8
But it seems that KDE + video recording was too much for my old phone
Still, if you going to see video, don't close it until 2:00 where I turned of composition which caused lags.
Also on device everything looks much smoother than on video, even after 2:00.
When I watch fullscreen (1280x720) video on my device, sparkle + xwayland together add just 5% of CPU load (20% load of single core).
Thats it I guess... I tried to to discuss sparkle on 4pda.ru (russian forums), but got very bad reception. "xsdl is perfect, dont reinvent the wheel" they say. So I started to hate humanity and I decided to make sparkle personal project. Also this is last time I am solving reCAPTCHA to leave post on XDA.

Still alive
We are still alive. I've changed first post to reflect actual state. Now sparkle supports audio, auto-mouting containers and is lot more stable.
Yet there are still many things I want to improve in sparkle's core before adding new functions.
Also there are few demo videos on ftp.

Amazing!
Working great on my redmi 6 pro. Stock miui 9.9.3 rom. With linuxdeploy and sparkle from your ftp. No lag on visual and sound. My Linux distribution is alpinelinux arm64 arch.
Since first time I see your posting on 4pda. I'm interested in it. And finally it's on xda.
Thanks dev.
---------- Post added at 02:52 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:44 AM ----------
For anyone interested in the topic. Please follow the instructions in documentation from ftp. And Translate it to eng from rus.

This sounds amazing! Just curious, is it related to https://github.com/twaik/sparkle ?

I now have it working very well on my Samsung Tab S3 using Xwayland and a tiling window manager. Firefox runs amazingly well!
Is it meant to be used only with Xwayland or will it also work with native Wayland applications?
BTW, I think if you open sourced this project and promoted it a bit, it could become quite popular. It's basically the first way to run X11 GUI applications on Android devices at full speed. If you set up a donation link, you could also get compensated for your time and effort. I'll personally contribute $20 if it's open sourced, and I'm sure others will chip in as well.

robsmith11 said:
This sounds amazing! Just curious, is it related to https://github.com/twaik/sparkle ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for feedback. Nice to hear that someone managed to start this thing
Twaik's repository is clone of my very very old version of sparkle. I made that version years ago when I was just starting to learn linux and C++. Sparkle was rewritten from scratch two or three times since that version. And (I believe) current version is much better.
Regarding making it open source... Few months ago I had to find real job. Can't spend much time on personal projects any more. But I have my own strange programming style and my own vision of what sparkle should be. Not sure I want others to paint on my picture. It's probably all because of Twaik! I hate how he used old open source version of sparkle. He did terrible things to it, outraging all my beliefs Sorry!
P.S.: Yesterday I've uploaded another apk to my ftp. The file is called "sparkle-testing.apk". This version is much newer and has many fixes. But I've also changed to many things since tested version including some fundamental changes. No guarantee it will run at all on other devices. Interest is mega low and I get no test reports at all.

Hi Hentacler, I've just found your project - it looks really promising. Unfortunately, the only link currently working on this thread is to github. Is this project still live?
I have a samsung galaxy note 10+, and am using it as a laptop replacement. In addition to the android apps using Samsung Dex (Samsung's desktop solution), I have several linux distributions installed inside a chroot using userLand - so far, its working great. I'd be keen to give you project a try if it's still live, and am happy to help out with testing from my device.
Re open source - while I like your project, I'm not super interested in investing time into something that's not open sourced - I appreciate your concerns about wanting to maintain the direction, but having transparent development is pretty important to me. Is Twaik's fork of your project a better place to go?
Cheers.

tillum said:
Hi Hentacler, I've just found your project - it looks really promising. Unfortunately, the only link currently working on this thread is to github. Is this project still live?
I have a samsung galaxy note 10+, and am using it as a laptop replacement. In addition to the android apps using Samsung Dex (Samsung's desktop solution), I have several linux distributions installed inside a chroot using userLand - so far, its working great. I'd be keen to give you project a try if it's still live, and am happy to help out with testing from my device.
Re open source - while I like your project, I'm not super interested in investing time into something that's not open sourced - I appreciate your concerns about wanting to maintain the direction, but having transparent development is pretty important to me. Is Twaik's fork of your project a better place to go?
Cheers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ftp://ftp.drivehq.com/mogryph/sparkle/
Link to FTP should work and there you can get two versions:
sparkle.apk - old version, but confirmed to work by 3-4 people.
sparkle-testing.apk - latest version, but only briefly tested by me.
I don't ask anyone to invest anything... Sparkle doesn't request root access or any other dangerous permissions (unless you enable automatic container mounting and starting) so it's safe to try for anyone who wants.
Btw, somewhere between these two versions I've replaced BASH container initialization script with LUA version. That was probably a bad idea. LUA script is harder to start directly as root and hacks I used may not work (currently may even cause application freeze if root access is denied). Going to revert to BASH probably. But this only touches people who want sparkle to mount container and launch everything automatically on single button press.
p.s.: Why I need to solve captcha every time I post something?

Thanks for the new release! I've updated and everything seems to be working without any changes on my Samsung Tab S3 with chroot and Arch Arm Linux.
Your changes also solved the flickering for me! The old version would flicker the screen whenever my keyboard's trackpoint activated, but it's not flickering at all any more. Performance seems to be about the same.
I think this could be quite popular, but not many people know about it. Perhaps a post on Hacker News or Reddit would raise awareness.
I understand your position on open source and maintaining control. One idea if you haven't already considered it is releasing the code with a restrictive license that forbids any forks. But either way, I'm enjoying being to properly use X11 on my tablet.
BTW, have you tried any native Wayland compositors? I don't really understand the Wayland ecosystem that well. I gave Sway a brief try, but it didn't seem to work. I've only been using XWayland.

@Hentacler Thanks for your reply! Very keen to get this working, but having a few issues. I'm unsure how to configure the user.lua file - I'm using your latest apk.
I have a non-rooted device, and am running archlinux under termux. Works fine with xsdl. I have installed xorg-server-wayland for X11. I'd appreciate any advice you have.
@robsmith11 Are you able to share how you got this working on Arch? Thanks!!!!

tillum said:
@Hentacler Thanks for your reply! Very keen to get this working, but having a few issues. I'm unsure how to configure the user.lua file - I'm using your latest apk.
I have a non-rooted device, and am running archlinux under termux. Works fine with xsdl. I have installed xorg-server-wayland for X11. I'd appreciate any advice you have.
@robsmith11 Are you able to share how you got this working on Arch? Thanks!!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am not sure it is possible to use sparkle without root...
Sparkle makes it's directory accessible for everyone (chmod 777). Before Android 8 or 9 this was enough and xwayland from termux was able to connect to sparkle. Here is how people used to start it:
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/data/data/com.sion.sparkle/files
Xwayland
But newer versions of Android brought more restrictions and termux can no longer connect to sparkle. These new restrictions are implemented using SELinux if you know what it is. Applications now have different security contexts.
But that is not all. Newest versions of android brought even more terrible meaningless restrictions effectively "killing" applications like termux and many others.
In short, from now one applications are not allowed to execute code (binary) that comes from "untrusted" sources. Termux used to download a lot of such code from it's own repositories. And now it can't. We can't even unpack binaries from assets.
So I can only help with rooted devices.
P.S. Please forgive me, but I am leaving this website. Making people solve recaptcha every time they want to post something is unacceptable level of contempt.
My mail: [email protected]

Thanks for that, will have a play. I could always just root my device. Weird about recaptcha, not having this issue. Currently through termux I have access to the whole sdcard, and am able to download packages (and distros) in it - will have a play and see what else is possible.

@tillum
I basically just followed the instructions on the first post for using Sparkle without busybox. I didn't need to modify the Lua scripts.
I'm guessing SELinux may be a problem without root. I'll try setting it up without root when I have a chance later.