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On windows, I have Android Commander installed so whenever I double click on an APK file, the information about it (ie: package name, version, etc) is displayed. I'm looking for something similar for a Mac OS X. What are my options?

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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

The best and quickest way to use it is to obtain the tool from the Android SDK, called aapt and invoke it from the command line like this:

aapt d --values badging some_apk_name.apk

An example of the output is shown:

package: name='foo.bar' versionCode='1' versionName='1.00'
sdkVersion:'7'
targetSdkVersion:'16'
application: label='FooBar' icon='res/drawable/ic_launcher_icon.png'
launchable activity name='foo.bar.activity'label='FooBar' icon=''
uses-permission:'android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE'
uses-feature:'android.hardware.touchscreen'
main
other-activities
other-receivers
other-services
supports-screens: 'small' 'normal' 'large' 'xlarge'
supports-any-density: 'true'
locales: '--_--'
densities: '120' '160' '240' '320'

This will extract certain but limited values and parse the encoded AndroidManifest.xml (which is binary encoded upon compilation from Java source to APK binary).

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up vote 0 down vote

You might want to try apktool. This will run on your Mac.

And as @Izzy mentioned, you can try APK Multi Tool to get the APK properties.

One last thing you could try is viewing the contents of the APK. This can be done by renaming your apk file to .zip and extracting its contents. You will then see a file called AndroidManifest.xml, this will show app version, package name, etc.

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-1 from me, in the last paragraph of your answer - by renaming the apk to zip, and unzipping, the manifest is in binary encoded format. – t0mm13b Mar 20 at 1:53
No its not. I can read the manifest.XML fine. Its probably just your machine. – Coder101 Mar 21 at 5:45
It may be viewable using apktool and other similar tool s etc... I stand by that comment! – t0mm13b Mar 21 at 12:49
I think its just your machine! – Coder101 Mar 22 at 17:05
No! Using Linux here, using tools such apktool etc, do go through the trouble in parsing and analyzing the AndroidManifest.xml - it might help you to learn that the xml you see using those tools are not exactly what was on the developer's build environment originally - FYI - see this Its well known its encoded in a proprietary binary format which when using aapt or similar can decode it. End of conversation! – t0mm13b Mar 22 at 17:20
up vote 0 down vote

You might want to take a look at e.g. apktool, which is written in Java and will run on a Mac -- the linked page even contains the installation instructions.

You might also want to take a look at APKInspector (written in Python, it seems). Not having a Mac, I cannot say for sure whether it will run on it.

Mentioned for completeness: APK Multi Tool. Will probably not run on a Mac, as the page only advertizes a Windows and a Linux version -- but maybe the latter can be made working with minor effort, so you might want to contact its developer.

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