Extending Existing Android Applications - Part One
There are a couple tutorials out there that show you how to reverse engineer Android applications. Usually these leave you with smali files which you can modify and recompile or they leave you with a .jar file that you can browse with a Java decompiler. Both of these methods leave something to be desired, namely; a good environment for writing new code. Smali files are a reliable representation of the code, but they're hard to use and they don't integrate with Eclipse and the typical development environment an Android developer is used to. Generating a jar file is more desirable. Of course, we need more than just the jar to compile the app; we also need its resources and the android manifest. Most tutorials focus on either apktool to get the smali files and the resources or dex2jar to get a jar file which can then be decompiled. Here I'm going to demonstrate how to use both apktool and dex2jar together with Eclipse to reverse and then extend an And...