Apktool VS apk-mitm

App tampering and repackaging can be performed by using reverse engineering or tampering tools, such as Apktool, dex2jar, etc.

Apktool made by iBotPeaches, this uses v2.9.1

Can someone clarify what "PP tools" are, and provide a link to them? I came across this link (https://apktool.org/) but I'm not sure if it's the right tool.

Apktool is all you need most of the time.

But it'll still be editable and we can make something good out of it. One of the famous ones, that I'm planning to use is ApkTool(https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/).

I did a dissection of twitter apk (got from apk pure) with apktool, and I found permission :

Not sure. I started reverse engineering Java apps very early in my life — initially it was J2ME games. Decompilers of the time sucked but that didn't stop me from modding Gravity Defied :P

I honestly don't know what's a good way of getting started on reverse engineering. There's a bunch of everything about Windows executables in particular, including "crackmes", but native machine code is a level up from JVM bytecode. Java classes and Android dex files can be decompiled back to sensible source with a good chance that you get something that can be compiled again. No such luck for native code — C/C++ compilation is a lossy process by its nature, especially the optimizations. Ghidra does a decent job but still requires a non-zero amount of manual assistance. Flash games also were good to hone one's reverse engineering skills since ActionScript decompilers did a pretty darn good job.

Anyway. To decompile dex to Java source, there's jadx: https://github.com/skylot/jadx

Since decompilation is sometimes lossy, there's apktool for when you want to put the app back together after tinkering with it: https://github.com/iBotPeaches/Apktool

It goes without saying that you also need a JDK and the Android SDK. In particular, you need apksigner form the SDK to sign the unsigned apks generated by apktool. You can also automate things a bit and use adb to deploy them to your device.

What I usually do is get a high-level overview of the app in jadx, and then modify the smali (dalvik bytecode in text form, very assembly-like) files generated by apktool.

I am not game or android app dev, but you might first need to de-compile apk using tools like https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/

For some reason fazolis rewards app from apkpure or anywhere has custom SSL Pinning (at least i think) I have tried patching fazolis rewards with https://github.com/shroudedcode/apk-mitm. And then using NoxPlayer for an emulator and mitmproxy to intercept https requests and some go through but others are not trusted by the client. What am I doing wrong? is it impossible for some applications?

If you want to capture and decrypt the traffic from one or a few apps without root, you can use apk-mitm to reverse engineering the apps to install a network config file which allows you to use user CA to decrypt the traffic of that app. apk-mitm will do everything for you, you will just have to reinstall the app(it requires first to uninstall from the phone because the app's signature will be different and it will not allow installing the apks from apk-mitm as an update to the original app). Modern apps use split apks, you can use SAI to install an app from split apks.

> For example, Chrome Desktop, Firefox, and IE did not enforce HPKP if they encountered a cert from a user-added CA. Why does Android do the opposite?

Your examples are all browsers. I understood that Chrome on Android will continue to support using a user-added CA added to the user store. Android and desktops behave exactly the same for web browsers.

Non-browser apps are where the differences exist. On Android you must opt-in each app to trust the user store. I'd imagine that the next step is automating https://github.com/shroudedcode/apk-mitm to bulk replace all installed apps with modified apks.

You can use (apk-mitm)[https://github.com/shroudedcode/apk-mitm]. Simply load the API and wait for the patched version. Then download HTTP canary or use Fidler (whatever you prefer). I prefer using HTTP canary since I can intercept the API without looking through the random other requests on my PC. You also don't need a rooted phone which is a +