APK
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Android Package Preview.
At a glance
| Purpose | An Android application package: a ZIP holding a binary AndroidManifest.xml, Dalvik bytecode, resources and signatures. |
| Extensions | .apk |
| Poka parser | poka-apk |
| Viewer | poka-tree-viewer |
| Depth tier | Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers) |
| Breadth tier | B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers) |
How much Poka reads
B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.
Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-apk/src/main.rs (990 lines) and plugin.json. Three unit tests, including builds_tree_from_sample over a corpus APK; the corpus has androguard_com.politedroid_4.apk, org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged_2130.apk and others. Covers .apk. The tree inflates AndroidManifest.xml and walks its binary XML: package name, version code and name, minimum, target and compile SDK, app label, the permissions and counts of activities, services, receivers and providers; it also counts DEX files, native ABIs, resource and asset entries and reports the signature scheme files. Judgement: B4: the manifest is decoded and the contents summarised, but no code, resource or asset is shown.
What Poka does not read
- DEX bytecode is not decoded: no class, method or string listing
- resources.arsc is not decoded, so a label stored as a resource reference is not resolved (judgement from the code)
- Component names (activities, services and the like), intent filters and features are counted, not listed
- Only v1 (JAR) signing is detected: an APK signed only with v2 or v3 shows no v1 JAR signature, and no signature is verified
- Icons, layouts and other resources are not shown
Libraries
Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.
- zip (used; MIT; Rust)
- apk-info (candidate; Apache-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/delvinru/apk-info) — APK/XAPK/APKM parser with AXML, ARSC and signature block support; Python bindings.
- axmldecoder (candidate; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/Ayrx/axmldecoder) — Decodes binary AndroidManifest.xml only; no resource ID resolution; last update seen May 2023 per docs.rs listing.
- Androguard (candidate; Apache-2.0; Python; https://github.com/androguard/androguard) — Full APK analysis toolkit (manifest, DEX, resources).
Sources
- parsers/poka-apk/src/main.rs
- parsers/poka-apk/plugin.json