Integrate an Android app (.apk) into an existing Android project

Question

Here's the use case:

A friend and I are building an Android app and along with it want to integrate a game. The core of the app has been built in Eclipse but we are looking into building the game with an app building tool like Google AppInventer (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/) or Corona (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/). We'd like the existing app we've built to have a button like "Play Game" which will launch the game we build using one of these utilities.

However when I messed around with Google App Inventor I noticed that I could only export the project as a .apk, which are binary files. Ideally, I'd build the app in AppInventor, export the source code and add the package to our existing project in Eclipse. Well, it's not that easy since we only have access to a .apk file. So my question is can this be done? How?

Some have suggested using an apk decompiler, but would this even be worth it? Are there any good apk decompilers that will give us access to some source code (java files, xml files, resources) without too big of a headache? Is there another tool out there that can export source code? Any other way to integrate 2 separate .apks?

Or will we need to build 2 separate apps? :(

Answer 1

A project written in App Inventor cannot be exported into Eclipse.

The created .apk file is not a binary file. It is a ZIP archive of several files and folders, but none of them is java code.

What can be done to combine an App Inventor app with an app created with Android SDK is to make use of the ActivityStarter component inside App Inventor. Details on that are here: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/other/activitystarter.html

Finally, keep in mind that App Inventor apps cannot be uploaded directly to the Market. However, some users have created a process that allows to do that, it is called Marketizer.

If you spend some time reading posts from this forum: programming-with-app-inventor (it is a Google Groups forum), you might get even better ideas.