How do I get the versionCode and versionName (badging) of an Android AAB file?

Question

Similar to Get Android .apk file VersionName or VersionCode WITHOUT installing apk, I want to get the versionCode and/or versionName with just an .aab file.

I've tried simply using the classic answer for .apk files, but substituting my .aab file instead, and it didn't work:

$ $ANDROID_HOME/sdk/build-tools/29.0.2/aapt dump badging my_aab.aab
ERROR: dump failed because no AndroidManifest.xml found

I also tried attempting to dump the xmltree directly:

$ $ANDROID_HOME/sdk/build-tools/29.0.2/aapt dump xmltree my_aab.aab base/manifest/AndroidManifest.xml
W/ResourceType(39872): Bad XML block: header size 664 or total size 118110474 is larger than data size 35953
ERROR: Resource base/manifest/AndroidManifest.xml is corrupt

Answer 1

Bundletool has a command to dump the manifest of the AAB in XML, and even extract specific attributes of the manifest using xpath.

bundletool dump manifest --bundle bundle.aab

And to extract just the versionCode:

bundletool dump manifest --bundle bundle.aab --xpath /manifest/@android:versionCode

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

.aab files store their xml in a protocol buffer format:

There is manifest folder having Android Manifest.xml file in the apk it is in binary format but in .aab it is real XML file compiled into a protocol buffer format because this allows to transform it easily.

And aapt2 has a convert subcommand that Converts an apk between binary and proto formats., and it will convert a .apk file that contains only an AndroidManifest.xml in proto format. Thus:

# Extract the AndroidManifest.xml directly
# without -p, unzip will recreate the directory structure.
unzip -p my_aab.aab base/manifest/AndroidManifest.xml > AndroidManifest.xml
# Create a dummy .apk with the proto-formatted AndroidManifest.xml
zip proto_version.apk AndroidManifest.xml
# Convert the proto-formatted AndroidManifest.xml into an apk-formatted XML
aapt2 convert proto_version.apk -o version.apk
# Now dump the badging
# I don't know why, but dump badging fails, so add `|| true` to make it succeed
aapt dump badging version.apk || true

Unfortunately, the final command doesn't succeed:

W/ResourceType(42965): No known package when getting value for resource number 0x7f100000
AndroidManifest.xml:47: error: ERROR getting 'android:icon' attribute: attribute value reference does not exist

But it does print the versionName and versionCode as expected. You can ignore the failure with || true, or you can use the dump xmltree subcommand to dump the raw XML, which succeeds:

aapt dump xmltree version.apk AndroidManifest.xml