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Juli '14



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Mon, 14 Mar 2011

Patching Android Apps

How to patch an Android application:

First off, some basics. Android applications are delivered in a single .apk file. This is simply a differently-named .zip file, so any common zip tool should be able to unpack it. Inside you will usually find all the resources (images, sounds) and (among other things) a file called classes.dex which contains the code for that application. This is bytecode for the dalvik VM. You can disassemble this bytecode into something you could call android assembler. Compared to real assembler code, this is pretty high-level, but still nothing like a high-level language like java. As method and member names are preserved, it is usually fairly easy to understand unless the author used an obfuscator before release (In that case, all your methods will be named a, b, c...).

To follow this example along, you need a few tools:

  • Your favourite editor
  • A simple zip/unzip utility (commandline or 7zip or similar gui tool)
  • An android assembler/disassembler
  • A way to sign your zip file.
    • For a quick&dirty hack, SignApk is easy to use, but you can also use jarsigner if you're already familiar with it.
  • Not to forget a working java installation. Smali/baksmali and signapk/jarsigner both require it.

As a simple example, we'll be removing the focus sound from the android camera. – As we'll be replacing a builtin app, you will need root access to your phone.

  1. First, get a copy of the .apk you intend to change. In our case, we grab it from our phone with:

    adb pull /system/app/Camera.apk

  2. Then, we need to get the classes.dex file from it

    unzip Camera.apk classes.dex

  3. Now we run the disassembler. The output will be in the out/ subdirectory.

    java -jar baksmali-1.2.6.jar classes.dex

    You can peek around the out/ subdir where all the code is. Change whatever you want.

  4. In our case, the file we need to edit is: com/android/camera/Camera$AutoFocusCallback.smali

    To remove the focus sound, look for a line containing invoke-virtual and ->startTone. In my version it looks like this:

    invoke-virtual {v0, v1}, Landroid/media/ToneGenerator;->startTone(I)Z"

    Just delete that line.

  5. After you're done, we need to put it all back together into an .apk. First we re-assemble the code into a classes.dex:

    java -jar smali-1.2.6.jar out -o classes.dex

  6. Put that file back into the .apk with

    zip Camera.apk classes.dex

  7. Because we changed the contents, we now need to re-sign it. If you're using signapk, do this:

    java -jar signapk.jar testkey.x509.pem testkey.pk8 Camera.apk Camera_signed.apk

  8. Last but not least, we need to install our new .apk. Because it's a system app, we need to actually replace the file like this:

    adb remount
    adb push Camera_signed.apk /system/app/Camera.apk

    If it were a normal app, you would simply uninstall the original, and then install the .apk like any other app. (e.g. with adb install foo.apk)

After you reboot your phone, your Camera should now be less noisy. Yay!

– Sec

P.S.: If you want to remove the shutter sound instead, check this thread on Basically it boils down to:

adb remount
adb shell rm /system/media/audio/ui/camera_click.ogg 

posted at: 14:46 | Category: /rev-eng | permanent link to this entry | 4 comments (trackback)

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