How to read content of apk file programmatically?

Question

I need read the content of apk file (including AndroidManifest.xml) programmatically. I know there are some tools like apktool, dex2jar, aapt to extract apk content but, I need to do the same through an Android application. By the way my start point is a valid apk file path.

Answer 1

First of all get the apk file from its path by this code

final PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
                PackageInfo packageInfo = null;
                try {
                    packageInfo = pm.getPackageInfo("PACKAGE NAME HERE", PackageManager.GET_META_DATA);
                } catch (NameNotFoundException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }

                File file = new File(packageInfo.applicationInfo.sourceDir);
                Uri uri = Uri.fromFile(file);

Answer 2

See this answer on another question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/34850406/55940

Basically you can use this:

PackageInfo packageInfo = context.getPackageManager().getPackageArchiveInfo(file.getAbsolutePath(), 0);

This would only get the meta data though... You would have to use a ZipInputStream etc to read the content of the file.