Hi everyone! I'm Alessandro and this is my first post. I will explain a way of getting the APK file of an installed Android application for further analysis.
First of all, I'm assuming we are working in a Windows platform, so we go to Android SDK page and get the version for this platform. In my case, I downloaded a ZIP file and uncompressed it. We will use the adb (Android Debug Bridge) application, which is located at UNZIPPED_FOLDER/sdk/platform-tools/adb.exe.
Once you connect your Android device to the computer, you could use the command adb devices to retrieve a list of devices.
With this tool you can perform several actions, such as opening a shell, retrieving files, recording the screen, etc. In this case, we'll use the adb pull command and the package manager. From the command line, we can list the installed packages on the Android device using adb and the package manager: adb shell pm list packages. After finding the package whose APK we want to save, the next step is to determine the path of the APK for that application. Normally, the APKs are located in the /data/app folder, but if we connect to the device through a shell, we cannot see anything there:
In spite of this issue with the permissions, using the adb tool we can find the correct path for the selected package: adb shell pm path selected.package.name
Now we know the correct location of the APK, we only have to retrieve it using the pull command: adb pull /data/app/yourapplication.apk
How can the APK file be useful? Well, in following articles we'll find out how to decompile it and get the application source code.
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