Dex2Jar is a freely available tool to work with Android “.dex” and Java “.class” files. As you may aware that “.dex” files are compiled Android application code file. Android programs are compiled into “.dex” (Dalvik Executable) files, which are in turn zipped into a single “.apk” file on the device. The “.dex” files can be created automatically by Android, by translating the compiled applications written in the Java programming language.
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The core feature of Dex2Jar is to convert the classes.dex file of an APK to classes.jar or vice versa. So, it is possible to view the source code of an Android application using any Java decompiler, and it is completely readable. Here, we get .class files and not the actual Java source code that was written by the application developer.
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Also, it is possible to get “.smali” files directly from the classes.dex file or vice versa. That means you can change the source code of an application directly working with this format.
To have the project on your computer, clone this repository by running from the command line:
$ git clone https://github.com/randyisback/dex2jar-2.0
Open the project directory in your favorite editor and feel free to make any improvements to it.
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