How to parse the AndroidManifest.xml file inside an .apk package

Question

This file appears to be in a binary XML format. What is this format and how can it be parsed programmatically (as opposed to using the aapt dump tool in the SDK)?

Answer 1

I have been running with the Ribo code posted above for over a year, and it has served us well. With recent updates (Gradle 3.x) though, I was no longer able to parse the AndroidManifest.xml, I was getting index out of bounds errors, and in general it was no longer able to parse the file.

Update: I now believe that our issues was with upgrading to Gradle 3.x. This article describes how AirWatch had issues and can be fixed by using a Gradle setting to use aapt instead of aapt2 AirWatch seems to be incompatible with Android Plugin for Gradle 3.0.0-beta1

In searching around I came across this open source project, and it's being maintained and I was able to get to the point and read both my old APKs that I could previously parse, and the new APKs that the logic from Ribo threw exceptions

https://github.com/xgouchet/AXML

From his example this is what I'm doing

  zf = new ZipFile(apkFile);

  //Getting the manifest
  ZipEntry entry = zf.getEntry("AndroidManifest.xml");
  InputStream is = zf.getInputStream(entry);

     // Read our manifest Document
     Document manifestDoc = new CompressedXmlParser().parseDOM(is);

     // Make sure we got a doc, and that it has children
     if (null != manifestDoc && manifestDoc.getChildNodes().getLength() > 0) {
        //
        Node firstNode = manifestDoc.getFirstChild();

        // Now get the attributes out of the node
        NamedNodeMap nodeMap = firstNode.getAttributes();

        // Finally to a point where we can read out our values
        versionName = nodeMap.getNamedItem("android:versionName").getNodeValue();
        versionCode = nodeMap.getNamedItem("android:versionCode").getNodeValue();
     }