axmldec

Stand-alone binary AndroidManifest.xml decoder

AndroidManifest.xml file in an APK file is binary encoded. This tool accepts either a binary or a text XML file and prints the decoded XML to the standard output or a file. It also allows you to extract the decoded AndroidManifest.xml directly from an APK file. Popular tools such as Apktool are designed to process the whole APK file including the resource files for reverse engineering purpose. They may also need a Java virtual machine to run. As a result, they are too slow for batch processing many APK files just to get the XML information. In contrast, axmldec is specialized for binary XML decoding and written in simple modern C++, so it runs nicely within a shell script.