Mobile Development

Extracting the Source Code of Android Applications

Decompiling JAVA Applications

Have you ever wondered how your favorite android apps work under the hood? Do you want to learn from the best practices of other developers or modify them for your own purposes? In this short tutorial, I will show you how to extract the source code of any android application in just 4 steps. All you need is the name of the app and some basic tools that you can find online.

This tutorial assumes that the used operating system is based on Linux, in my case Ubuntu 16.04 but should work on most Unix-based systems.

Disclaimer: the following article is provided for learning and entertainment purposes only; with no guarantee that it will work and does not give the rights to apply the mentioned techniques on third-party applications.

Step-1: Download the APK File

The first step is to download an APK file. For this, we can use tools that we find online. One of them is https://apkcombo.com/fr-fr/apk-downloader/. Otherwise, feel free to ask Google: “download apk”.

Step-2: Decompress the APK File

To decompress the APK, just rename it with a ZIP extension and then decompress…