How to view the contents of an Android APK file?

Actually the apk file is just a zip archive, so you can try to rename the file to theappname.apk.zip and extract it with any zip utility (e.g. 7zip).

The androidmanifest.xml file and the resources will be extracted and can be viewed whereas the source code is not in the package - just the compiled .dex file ("Dalvik Executable")

It's shipped with Android Studio now. Just go to Build/Analyze APK... then select your APK :)

While unzipping will reveal the resources, the AndroidManifest.xml will be encoded. apktool can – among lots of other things – also decode this file.

To decode the application App.apk into the folder App, run

apktool decode App.apk App

apktool is not included in the official Android SDK, but available using most packet repositories.

There is also zzos. (Full disclosure: I wrote it). It only decompiles the actual resources, not the dex part (baksmali, which I did not write, does an excellent job of handling that part).

Zzos is much less known than apktool, but there are some APKs that are better handled by it (and vice versa - more on that later). Mostly, APKs containing custom resource types (not modifiers) were not handled by apktool the last time I checked, and are handled by zzos. There are also some cases with escaping that zzos handles better.

On the negative side of things, zzos (current version) requires a few support tools to install. It is written in perl (as opposed to APKTool, which is written in Java), and uses aapt for the actual decompilation. It also does not decompile attrib resources yet (which APKTool does).

The meaning of the name is "aapt", Android's resource compiler, shifted down one letter.

4 suggested ways to open apk files:

1.open apk file by Android Studio (For Photo,java code and analyze size) the best way

2.open by applications winRar,7zip,etc (Just to see photos and ...)

3.use website javadecompilers (For Photo and java code)

4.use APK Tools (For Photo and java code)