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I'm amazed at how many comments there are in line with "OMG this is amazing, now I can decompile thousands of apps blah blah". I write Android apps all day long
by dschuler 14y ago
I'm amazed at how many comments there are in line with "OMG this is amazing, now I can decompile thousands of apps blah blah". I write Android apps all day long, but I have yet to find a (legitimate) need to decompile someone else's apps. I suspect all this decompiling, repackaging, and re-signing is designed for people to strip license checks, remove ads, add some other nonsense, and repackage the whole deal for distribution on 3rd-party app stores or websites, without the consent of any of the original developers. I've seen this with my own apps, which are repackaged with different resources, while keeping the code mostly intact. The result is then re-published by someone else. Instead of spending so much energy ripping off other apps, why not create something new? We certainly haven't exhausted what's possible in terms of app breadth and quality.
- javajosh 14y agoWord. But that said, one totally legit use is learning from other coders. I figure as long as you learn from and don't just rip off stuff, apk decoding could enable an almost front-end-web level of collaborative learning.
- daeken 14y agoI wrote the first native Dalvik decompiler, and it wasn't used for any of the things you mention. Decompilers of this sort are tremendously useful tools in security work.
- megablast 14y agoI guess someone could use it to check that assets were not being stolen, by the creator of the app.
- lxdvs 14y agoAs I noted in the Github Readme, this tool will not generate code that you will able to REcompile. My tool does a lot of things, but straight-up repackaging/ripping off other people's apps is exactly what apk2gold is bad at.