Android: How to find which platform version an APK targets?

Question

Given an APK, is it possible to determine which version of Android platform it targets?

Answer 1

Use aapt:

aapt list -a package.apk | grep SdkVersion 

You will see version numbers in hex. e.g.:

  A: android:minSdkVersion(0x0101020c)=(type 0x10)0x3   A: android:targetSdkVersion(0x01010270)=(type 0x10)0xc 

For this apk, minSdkVersion is 0x3 i.e. 3, and targetSdkVersion is 0xc i.e. 12.

Answer 2

Use apktool

java -jar apktool.jar d app.apk 

Then look in the generated apktool.yml file for this:

sdkInfo:   minSdkVersion: '11'   targetSdkVersion: '17' 

You can match the SDK version to Android version here. In the above example minimum Android version is 3.0 and target version is 4.2.