I’m experimenting with Android and I want to know if the following is possible: can I modify/patch an installed APP using another APP?
I know it’s possible with root access, but I was wondering about non-rooted phones.
The only solution that comes to mind is the following:
-Create copy of original APK from data/app/ folder
-Patch/rebuild it
-Launch installation of the patched APK
The user would need to confirm the installation, but in theory it would work right? Any other tecniques that I haven’t thought of?
In case you’re wondering, I’m interested in injecting different strings and other resources into existing apps to provide translations or other modifications (ex: cheats in games), without changing the source of original apps.
You are right, you can do this on a device. Smali/Baksmali can be used on Android, also the apktool should be callable (I have only tried smali).
A year ago or so I have tried to use smali on a device and autopatch the source output. There was some information on the net (which I’m currently unable to find, sorry) but it was very limited, at least someone showed how to use smali/baksmali correctly. I have abandoned this approach because I’m not that good at java and the resources on a phone are rather limited.
Another approach I thought of was to offload the actual work to a server somewhere in the net. But this has its very own problem as you need to transfer the files, you may need the framework.apks, and so on.
This is interesting but hard stuff, you need to decode/parse/patch/rebuild apks and this has to be reliable. When you fail, the worst thing is that the users phone is broken (I wanted to modify critical system apks, bad idea ;)).