Edit image resources inside an android APK file | pofHQ

Edit image resources inside an android APK file

Today I had to change some image resources in a APK file, the process is easy once you know it, so I just post it here for future reference:

First use the tool “aapt” from the android SDK to list the resources:
$ANDROID/tools/aapt list file.apk

Once we locate the resources that we need to change, we use “remove” and “add” to replace them:

$ANDROID/tools/aapt remove file.apk res/drawable/file.png
$ANDROID/tools/aapt add file.apk res/drawable/file.png

Then we have to remove the old APK signature and replace it with a new one.
We will generate a fake self signed key to sign the APK:

$ openssl genrsa -out key.pem 1024
$ openssl req -new -key key.pem -out request.pem
$ openssl x509 -req -days 9999 -in request.pem -signkey key.pem -out certificate.pem
$ openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -outform DER -in key.pem -inform PEM -out key.pk8 -nocrypt

Remove the old signature from the APK:

for f in `$ANDROID/tools/aapt list file.apk |grep "META-INF"` ; do
$ANDROID/tools/aapt remove file.apk $f
done

And now we sign the APK, I use signapk.jar to do this:
$ java -jar signapk.jar certificate.pem key.pk8 file.apk file-signed.apk

That’s it, our APK is now ready to install… just remember to setup your android phone to allow installing applications from unknown sources

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