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C Code in G1? JF? Anyone?

I'm just wondering is anyone trying this yet? i mean is it even possible?
Just a thought for you big shot android devs out there JF, Haykuro, LucidREM

Google "android jni"

Well, a quick trip around google would have helped you.
Android is using java, and currently it's not possible to use anything else.
But anyway, would you rather compile all of your code for multiple architectures? J makes things easier here...
You can write cli-apps in C though... i heard something about that there was plans to make other languages available in android, but i wouldn't hold my breath
Also, why is this related to JF/Haykuro/LucidREM?

I think you can do this with JNI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Native_Interface

Using an ARM native compiler (such as the ones at CodeSourcery, http://www.codesourcery.com/sgpp/lite/arm/portal/[email protected]=lite) you can compile your apps and run them fine on the G1
Code:
$ arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc -static foo.c -o foo
$ adb push foo /data/foo # we are pushing to /data as it is +rwx (read, write, execute) for a standard user.
$ adb shell /data/foo
a=1
b=2
foo=a+b
foo=3

^^^
OH I love when I stumble across a post like this and have something new to play with.

The problem is due to the different location of the linker and mainly the different libc you have to statically link everything.
I have been having a hell of a time getting DPKG to build statically.

I picked up a copy of the newly released book, Unlocking Android, at Barnes and Noble yesterday. There is a whole chapter devoted to writing native apps using C (and ARM assembler) with the CodeSourcery tools linked above. The author walks through the steps you need to do to dynamically link the libraries so you don't end up with enormous statically linked executables. Well worth the price.

It is surprising what you can do with C on the phone, its actually not too difficult. The method outlined below doesn't use the non native toolchains and if you use the sourcery toolchain (as mentioned above) you will end up with bigger binaries as you need to link in a standard glibc and not androids bionic libc. This may or may not be important for your project.
The other advantage of the steps below is that you will build and link against any library that is available to the android platform
The easiest way that I've found to start when porting or writing new applications is this method.
1) Check out the current git android source.
2) Build the entire tree, "make" in the top level directory.
3) Create a new directory in mydroid/external/packagename/
4) Copy one of the simple android Android.mk (Make) files from a "like" target.
(If doing a library, choose a library, if coding an executable , choose that).
5) source the mydroid/build/envsetup.sh in the users bashrc
6) cd to your directory, then instead of the usual "make" do an mm.
This should create a binary, which you can adb push to the phone and run at the console.
You can do all the usual things if linked properly, like write the framebuffer using sdl, play sounds, create network connections.
Just remember that you dont have a standard libc (glibc) to play around with you have "bionic". If you are missing your favourite glibc function , it is probably intention and not abug. You'll either need to port it or make do with the functions provided by bionic.
These instructions are for a "pure" C program. you can mix the java like dex calling by 'shelling' out to the C application when you need performance, however premature optimization is the root of all evil, you'll be surprised what performance you can pull from davlik (And I expect the VM guys to improve this even further).
I know that is a lot to digest. Will do the best I can to answer your questions. I'm by no means an expert in the area, but have learned a bit about C on android.

Well I don't know much about all this but what i know is that e.g.
ScummVM IS written in C++ , and so is g-arcade.
His FAQ says:
"How did you do this? Is it Java?
No. ScummVM is a C++ program. For this port, I turned it into a really big JNI library so Android still thinks it's running a Java program, but almost all of it is implemented in C++."
(http://sites.google.com/site/scummvmandroid/faq#TOC-How-did-you-do-this-Is-it-Java-)
So if some1 wanna port MAME, feel free to xD

Please help editing android source apk

I've been searching for about an hour now and haven't found a thing. I think I'm missing something extremely obvious but I'm completely stumped. I'm trying to simply create a new android project in eclipse from an existing source, the Launcher found in the android 2.0 source. It creates the new project with no problems and everything looks like it is supposed to look except I have about 74 errors among various different classes. I've looked through some of the errors and many are variables that haven't been declared and others are references to classes that don't exist. I've tried numerous times with several different app sources with the same problem in every single app. I've even tried downloading the source for separate apks and the same thing happens. What am I missing?!
I'm pretty new to coding android apps but decent with java. My biggest problem is just getting the apps to compile without even making any modifications yet! Any help is appreciated

matt_stang said:
...I'm trying to simply create a new android project in eclipse from an existing source, the Launcher found in the android 2.0 source...except I have about 74 errors among various different classes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The android.jar which is linked in to the project by ADT only exposes the public Android API (as seen in the official documentation.) Launcher, and other "system" apps included with the platform, almost invariably access a number of private APIs which are not exposed in the SDK, and cannot be built with ADT--at least, not easily.
As it turns out, android.jar can be edited to expose all those private APIs, which is something Brut.all has worked on as part of apktool, but he hasn't done this for an entire android.jar.
Your other alternative--and practically speaking, the only current alternative--is to build it the official way, by compiling a complete platform on Linux using the full Android build process, and including your Launcher customizations. After building the whole system once you can build just the desired APK, as I understand.

olearyp said:
The android.jar which is linked in to the project by ADT only exposes the public Android API (as seen in the official documentation.) Launcher, and other "system" apps included with the platform, almost invariably access a number of private APIs which are not exposed in the SDK, and cannot be built with ADT--at least, not easily.
As it turns out, android.jar can be edited to expose all those private APIs, which is something Brut.all has worked on as part of apktool, but he hasn't done this for an entire android.jar.
Your other alternative--and practically speaking, the only current alternative--is to build it the official way, by compiling a complete platform on Linux using the full Android build process, and including your Launcher customizations. After building the whole system once you can build just the desired APK, as I understand.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
But I already have the whole system built on my mac.. so maybe is it a matter of pointing the project to the right directory for the private APIs? Or importing a android.jar from the built source to the project..? I'm very confused

matt_stang said:
But I already have the whole system built on my mac.. so maybe is it a matter of pointing the project to the right directory for the private APIs? Or importing a android.jar from the built source to the project..? I'm very confused
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is no android.jar with what you're looking for. If you already have the entire platform--either http://android.git.kernel.org/ or the CM source repository--just modify that, then build from the command line. AFAIK, you have to build from the command line, though, using `make'.

olearyp said:
There is no android.jar with what you're looking for. If you already have the entire platform--either http://android.git.kernel.org/ or the CM source repository--just modify that, then build from the command line. AFAIK, you have to build from the command line, though, using `make'.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That makes a lot more sense. Thanks

Android Malware Analysis

Hi folks,
I have just started exploring the prospect of Android Malware Analysis recently. As of now I have mostly done Static Analysis using tools like APKTool, APKManager, Dex2Jar, Jd-GUI. Cheers to people in the forum who have contributed with these tools and cleared the initial questions, that was really helpful.
Recently I was trying to analyze a malware that sends SMS to the C&C individuals, using the above mentioned tools I changed the C&C number which was hardcoded in the code to the port number of an emulator on my system. I was able to se the SMSes being diverted to the emulator.
I wanted to try something at the next level now, I was thinking of loading the apk in eclipse and putting breakpoints in the code so that I can catch the different activities. A scenario would be before the SMS is sent out of the app the code stops executing at my breakpoint so that I can view what is going on. Hoping that this feels similar to debugging an exe in OllyDBG. I hope I got my point right.
Right now I followed a number of tutorials online and imported the apk code onto eclipse. I have been following a tutorial highlighted here
http://kkinder.com/2011/11/27/so-you-want-to-reverse-engineer-an-android-app-apk/
So right now I have .smali code as well as java code ( which I am getting by opening the apk as a jar file in JD GUI and saving from there as mentioned in the tutorial). The problem is I am getting errors in every java file that I import in eclipse.
Is there a better and easier way to debug apk files on eclipse, or rather is there a tool which I can use to do something like adding breakpoints before an app sends out an sms for instance.
Pardon me for the long post but i thought ill provide as much information as possible so that you guys can help.
Thanks in advance :good:

Bump
skeptre said:
Hi folks,
I have just started exploring the prospect of Android Malware Analysis recently. As of now I have mostly done Static Analysis using tools like APKTool, APKManager, Dex2Jar, Jd-GUI. Cheers to people in the forum who have contributed with these tools and cleared the initial questions, that was really helpful.
Recently I was trying to analyze a malware that sends SMS to the C&C individuals, using the above mentioned tools I changed the C&C number which was hardcoded in the code to the port number of an emulator on my system. I was able to se the SMSes being diverted to the emulator.
I wanted to try something at the next level now, I was thinking of loading the apk in eclipse and putting breakpoints in the code so that I can catch the different activities. A scenario would be before the SMS is sent out of the app the code stops executing at my breakpoint so that I can view what is going on. Hoping that this feels similar to debugging an exe in OllyDBG. I hope I got my point right.
Right now I followed a number of tutorials online and imported the apk code onto eclipse. I have been following a tutorial highlighted here
http://kkinder.com/2011/11/27/so-you-want-to-reverse-engineer-an-android-app-apk/
So right now I have .smali code as well as java code ( which I am getting by opening the apk as a jar file in JD GUI and saving from there as mentioned in the tutorial). The problem is I am getting errors in every java file that I import in eclipse.
Is there a better and easier way to debug apk files on eclipse, or rather is there a tool which I can use to do something like adding breakpoints before an app sends out an sms for instance.
Pardon me for the long post but i thought ill provide as much information as possible so that you guys can help.
Thanks in advance :good:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Dropbox for RT via Python

I brought up some thoughts about Dropbox in mamaich's thread and netham45 was nice enough to bring up some interesting facts about Dropbox, namely that it's compiled in Python.
I'm totally unqualified and have no idea how to actually do the tough stuff, but i'm just going to leave all my notes so far in this thread so someone perhaps more knowledgeable with Python can take it from here. I will try to play it around to get it working though.
Basically after extracting Python from the .exe I got left with a bunch of .pycs that need to be recompiled into the .py that made up the file. I have no idea how to do this. See here http://nixforums.org/about81754.html - if this can be built into some sort of functional program, then it may be very well possible to take this one step further and recompile an .exe for ARM that runs dropbox - or even more easily just compile a working python file for Dropbox
this also might be interesting http://kyl191.net/2012/04/dropbox-api-python-to-sync-a-folder/
I also thought it's worth pointing out this https://github.com/mdornseif/dropbox-client-python
last but not least http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2678180/how-does-dropbox-use-python-on-windows-and-os-x
Maybe someone will have a better idea about what's going on here

The compiled python -should- be platform independent. I honestly don't know much about Python, but we should be able to just reverse whatever dropbox.exe is doing (which should be just a launcher), mimic it, and get a rather functional dropbox.
Another thing that could be done is implement a client in .net. I played with doing just that a couple weeks ago, I had a semi functional (it worked, but had some issues still) offline client in not very many lines of code using a .net library for Dropbox. I'll see if I can get my code up sometime soon.

netham45 said:
The compiled python -should- be platform independent. I honestly don't know much about Python, but we should be able to just reverse whatever dropbox.exe is doing (which should be just a launcher), mimic it, and get a rather functional dropbox.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The Python-to-exe packers I know basically include a native loader that unpacks the python dll and loads it either from temporary location or directly from memory and then passes the script to that dll.
It's probably just a matter of figuring out which packer they used and/or porting one of the packers and repackaging it again for RT

DarkoLord said:
The Python-to-exe packers I know basically include a native loader that unpacks the python dll and loads it either from temporary location or directly from memory and then passes the script to that dll.
It's probably just a matter of figuring out which packer they used and/or porting one of the packers and repackaging it again for RT
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wrong track completely. The compiled python being referred to above is not python packed into an exe. It is a .pyc file. Contrary to popular belief python is not interpreted line by line. Instead it is compiled into bytecode and then a virtual machine executes that. The bytecode can be saved into a .pyc file (there is a tool included in the standard python install for it somewhere, alternately if you try importing any script as a python module then python will automatically make a .pyc for it which you can use), it has a smaller file size and is not human readable. This is the file being referred to.
It is possible to reverse engineer .pyc files. I remember seeing a tool which is capable of making a pretty good attempt of reverse engineering non obfuscated bytecode, thats the disadvantage to python being open source, the bytecode specification is publicly viewable can't remember the tools name and I would think dropbox have obfuscated their pyc files.

SixSixSevenSeven said:
Wrong track completely. The compiled python being referred to above is not python packed into an exe. It is a .pyc file. Contrary to popular belief python is not interpreted line by line. Instead it is compiled into bytecode and then a virtual machine executes that. The bytecode can be saved into a .pyc file (there is a tool included in the standard python install for it somewhere, alternately if you try importing any script as a python module then python will automatically make a .pyc for it which you can use), it has a smaller file size and is not human readable. This is the file being referred to.
It is possible to reverse engineer .pyc files. I remember seeing a tool which is capable of making a pretty good attempt of reverse engineering non obfuscated bytecode, thats the disadvantage to python being open source, the bytecode specification is publicly viewable can't remember the tools name and I would think dropbox have obfuscated their pyc files.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm aware of that (by script file I meant pyc, of course), but what would be the reason for trying to reverse engineer the pyc files since the bytecode itself is platform independent?
For starters someone should just try running the unpacked .pcy files on the RT or are we past that and there is some platform specific stuff inside that prevents it from working?

DarkoLord said:
I'm aware of that (by script file I meant pyc, of course), but what would be the reason for trying to reverse engineer the pyc files since the bytecode itself is platform independent?
For starters someone should just try running the unpacked .pcy files on the RT or are we past that and there is some platform specific stuff inside that prevents it from working?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The pycs are getting magic number errors when I try to look at them because i'm not running it through the interpreter - because I dont know what the interpreter is. I think the first step is to find a way to get it compiled and running to find out if its platform independent or if there are dependencies.
I also have no idea which .pyc to start with

Ah, magic number.
Apparently Dropbox uses a bit modified version of python interpreter with some encryption and mixed opcodes.
Here are some details: http://blog.codepainters.com/2012/09/17/python-care-and-feeding-the-dropbox-way/. It looks like it could be done

Wow, if we could have legit dropbox on RT, that would be AMAZING!!

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync
Any idea if this would be helpful?

userno69 said:
Wow, if we could have legit dropbox on RT, that would be AMAZING!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I really agree, is this project still alive??

maxxie85 said:
I really agree, is this project still alive??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's been six months since this thread was posted in. I doubt it.

netham45 said:
It's been six months since this thread was posted in. I doubt it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yeah I noticed that to, never hurts to ask.
And by the way, maybe now the life in this project is getting resparkeld.
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Forking AOSP Keyboard and Compiling with Android Studio

Hello all,
I am interested in forking the AOSP keyboard and compiling it with Android Studio, but I am having a hard time doing so.
I have already cloned the repo from here: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/inputmethods/LatinIME
When I try to open it in Android Studio however, I am running in to issues. I found online that I apparently need to import it as an Eclipse project to add Gradle to it, which I have tried as well, but I still cannot get the project recognized. I also tried importing just the "java" folder, which worked after I fixed the Gradle errors and the missing class errors by copying the classes from the other folders in to the appropriate location in the java folder. Doing that, I was able to compile the keyboard, but trying to use it results in it crashing with the following error in logcat: Could not load native library jni_latinime
What is wrong and does anyone know how I can fix it? Ideally, I would like to use a project structure that does not involve moving other classes around as I have been doing so that I can stay up to date with the official repo with minimal merge conflicts. Does anyone have any advice?
Thanks in advance!