# Andromeda

> Interactive command-line tool by Lasha Khasaia for first-pass reverse engineering of Android APKs, written in C/C++ for speed. It unpacks an APK, parses AndroidManifest.xml, the signing certificate and the DEX files at the archive root, then opens a shell with tab completion for listing permissions, activities, services, receivers and likely entry points, listing and searching classes, methods and strings, disassembling a method's Dalvik bytecode and listing, hashing or extracting native libraries. Further commands report whether the app is debuggable, a creation date taken from its certificate, URL and email strings, and a guess at whether it was written in Java, Kotlin or Xamarin .NET.

- Type: Tool
- Targets: App
- Category: Android tools
- Relationship: Foundation tool
- Sources reviewed: 2026-10-27
- Added to the catalog: 2026-11-03
- Original resource: <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda>
- Primary source: <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/README.md>
- Catalog page: <https://awesomerea.org/resources/andromeda/>
- Record JSON: <https://awesomerea.org/resources/andromeda/record.json>
- Chinese version: [简体中文](https://awesomerea.org/zh/resources/andromeda/index.md)

## Requirements & limits

- Inactive early-stage project: the README says the tool is in the early development stage, and its 29 commits run from 2019-09-22 to the reviewed master commit of 2020-03-14, which removes an editor folder. There are no tags or releases, and GitHub does not mark the repository archived. Documenting the tool is still a TODO; the README shows the command list only as a screenshot, and the author notes very limited Android experience.
- Built from source with make, which compiles everything with clang++ in C++17 mode (-std=c++1z) and debug flags (-g -O0), linking zlib and OpenSSL's libcrypto; the README's apt commands install clang, libz-dev and libssl-dev. The Makefile adds libstdc++fs on Linux and Homebrew openssl@1.1 paths on macOS; Windows is not covered.
- Input is an APK supplied by the user, run as ./bin/andromeda app.apk. The path must end in .apk, and the tool stops if the unpacked archive lacks AndroidManifest.xml or a DEX file at its root, so bare DEX files are not accepted. The repository contains no sample APKs.
- Apache-2.0 license. third_party.md lists the bundled libraries with their own licenses: Google's dexter slicer (Apache-2.0), Claud Xiao's AxmlParser, linenoise-cpp, miniz and pugixml; the tree also bundles the digestpp hashing headers.

## Primary sources

1. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/README.md>
2. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/Andromeda/Andromeda.cpp>
3. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/Andromeda/APK.hpp>
4. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/Andromeda/patterns.hpp>
5. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/Makefile>
6. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/third_party.md>
7. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/tree/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/slicer>
8. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/blob/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a/LICENSE>
9. <https://github.com/secrary/Andromeda/commits/50fdaaf59328fb3430d76d92c6319d2232766f7a>

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## About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.
Original editorial content: MIT. Linked projects, papers and assets retain their own rights and licenses.