Q: Recapture of .apk file of an installed Android app possible?

General
#1

Q: Can i recapture or recover the .apk file of an installed and working Android app?

The reasons are:
I have my banking app on an Xperia 10, and it works.
The system on the X10 is in a bad state because of a failed experiment I made, so I want to reflash.
I can’t simply reinstall the app after reflashing because search function of Aurora Store is not working at the moment.

So I think, if I could find the original .apk file somewhere deep in the system, I could backup it to computer before reflashing and manual reinstall it after reflashing the X10…

Any solutions or ideas?

#2

You can try “apk extractor” available in f-droid.

3 Likes
#3

Thank you very much @phklrz , success, it brought the apk back! :star_struck:

edit: the search function of Aurora Store worked ONE TIME on the old and hardly used phone, It updated the banking app to the current version. I repeated APK Extractor and so i now have a backup of the 1 year old and the current version.

#4

Glad that it worked.

There is a workaround for the broken search functionality in aurora store to install apps.
Heres what i do:

  1. i search the app on my browser and open the google play result website
  2. generate a qr code from the link
  3. scan the link with code reader
  4. open the link in code reader

the “open link” functionality asks you which application to use and there you can just choose aurora store and get right to the app to download it - no search needed.

there is probably another way to trigger the “open link” functionality of sfos but the qr code route works for me pretty good (since i often transfer links from my laptop via qr code to my phone)

1 Like
#5

Thank you, @Simerax, for outlining a way around the broken search functionality. Actually, I suggested this solution to the TO, but I didn’t have a solution for how to “open with Aurora” on SFOS, so I didn’t publicly suggest it. I am glad there are ways to accomplish this! I have seen similar solutions on Android phones without Google Play.

#6

Within an android browser you can use open with aurora, if you allow it in the settings

1 Like
#7

Example for manual extraction:

[root ~]# find /home/.android/ -name base.apk
/home/.android/data/app/~~ABC==/org.mozilla.firefox-DEF==/base.apk

is the same file like fenix-114.2.0-arm64-v8a.apk

3 Likes