Chapter 3. Fundamental Building Blocks of Android Apps

This chapter gives an overview of Android app internals. It is essential to understand how apps are being built under the hood, what it looks like when it is installed on the device, how they are run, and so on. We make use of this knowledge in other chapters, where we discuss topics such as reverse engineering and pentesting Android apps. This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Basics of Android apps
  • App build process
  • Understanding how Android apps run on an Android device
  • Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM) and Android Runtime (ART)
  • Basic building blocks of Android apps

Basics of Android apps

Every app that we download and install from the Play Store or any other source has the extension .apk. These ...

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