Editing Guides/Monitoring network traffic from an Android app/editcopy (section)

==== Decompile the APK files using apktool ====

[[File:Compressed AndroidManifest.xml screenshot.png|thumb|right|A screenshot of an [[AndroidManifest.xml]] file, when extracted from base.zip -- this doesn't look like an .xml file at all!]]

To modify the files of an APK package, we will first need to extract individual files from the downloaded APK files.

APK files are essentially just ZIP files in disguise. If you change the <code>.apk</code> file extension to <code>.zip</code>, you can open the file in any archiving software, just like a normal ZIP file. However, some files inside the APK file (such as [[AndroidManifest.xml]]) are in a weird, binary format. To read all of the files properly, we will use [https://apktool.org/ Apktool].

[[File:Uncompressed AndroidManifest.xml screenshot.png|thumb|right|A screenshot of an [[AndroidManifest.xml]] file, when extracted using apktool -- this looks much more familiar!]]
<ol>
<li>Open a terminal in the directory with your copied APK files.</li>
<li>
Type the following commands to decompile the APK files using Apktool:
<pre>
apktool d base.apk
apktool d split_config.arm64_v8a.apk
</pre>
This will create new directories - <code>base</code> and <code>split_config.arm64_v8a</code> with the contents of the APK files.
</li>
</ol>

You can now explore the application files freely using a file manager.