So far we've been working with tools that are centered around Android developer and not reverse engineering. 1
But now we're going to download our first security tool. 2
It's a super popular tool and you can say that is part of the foundation of most Static Analysis Tools 3
out there. 4
This tool is called apktool so if you just google apktool you will reach this Web site. 5
You can install it from github.IO and you can click on install here you can see about the different 6
options on how to install it on different operating systems. 7
But on Linux you can just use APT-get. 8
install apktool. 9
Now the downside here is that you'll be getting the last version available in this repository not the 10
actual last version. 11
So now we have apktool installed on the system. 12
So let's just run this on a sample API okay. 13
Just google sample APK. 14
It doesn't really matter at this point. 15
You'll be redirected to some popular APK site OK. 16
apkmirror.com is a popular site that allows you to download APKs. 17
So for example if there's a specific app you're looking for say flappy birds. 18
Just google for example Flappy Birds apk and it will probably lead you to apkmirror. As we mentioned 19
in the beginning of this course, 20
It's always better to download from the Play Store but from the Play Store you will not be given the 21
Apk. So. 22
OK we downloaded it and we'll just call this test. 23
Let's go to the downloads folder and run apktool on the apk using the 'D' parameter so 'D' for decode 24
so we're going to decompile the APK. 25
There you go. 26
We will have a look at this tool in more detail during the reverse engineering part of the course.