How to Decompile a APK to .java Files

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This is a topic that I had to google multiple times during multiple CTF sessiosn, so decided to write a small post regarding it.

APK reversing has been a newer topics in recent CTFs. You can use APKTool, but it gives out smali files as a output (but also Non-java files such as AndroidManifest.xml), which is not very comfortable to read. So We’ll be using 2 tools:

1) Dex2Jar 2) Procyon

–> Dex2Jar converts an APK File to a Jar File with .class files

–> Procyon Converts .class files to .java files for easy readibility

Usage

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• Step 1 — -> Use the Dex2Jar Script

 $ ~/Desktop/CTF/dex2jar-2.0/d2j-dex2jar.sh <APK>

This returns a jar file.

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• Step 2 —

-> Use procyon jar to generate the file structure with .java files

$ java -jar decompiler.jar -jar myJar.jar -o out

You can change Directory to Out to view the code.

NOTE : For non-java files use

$ apktool d <APK>

Let the reversing begin.