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Monday, July 26, 2010

Get apk from phone

When I do flashing my Samsung Spica for the first time, I lost all of my application. It means I need to download it all again from market and costs my credit. Therefore I need to get my apk from phone, and backup it all to my PC.

After doing some tests and trials based on a clue from my friend. I finally find a way to backup all of applications by downloading all installed apk from the phone, and it's really simple.

Before going further, we need to install android SDK:

  • Download android sdk from here 
  • Extract android sdk zip file to C:\
  • Add this "C:\android-sdk-windows\tools" to windows path in environment variable

And then to allow you accessing /data/app directory, you must have root permission therefore wee need to root the device. You can follow instructions in here to root your device here, but please be careful because it can bricks your device.

When you download applications from market, the system will store the apk files in /Data/app. Base on this information we can pull all of downloaded apk from phone to PC by using adb pull command.

adb pull /data/app "your destination directory"

And you can find all of your downloaded apk in "your destination directory".

1 comment:

  1. can these apk files treat as master files for installing on your android phone again?

    ReplyDelete