[Android Apps and Games] omniwolf:
Hi Guys,

I was speaking to baadnwz a couple of weeks ago and i asked him which script he used to properly pack all the APKs in his ROM. He told me he used no script, just repacked the APKs he thought were most relevant.

I figured it couldn't be too hard to write something that took an APK, extracted it somewhere, then repacked it with the proper compression, so i wrote one. baadnwz then challenged me to make it work for multiple APKs, so he can just run it against a folder full of them like a lazy asshole. i went one better, and made a script that you could run against a ROM folder structure, it will search out all APKs, repack them, and copy them back into place. HOT!

because this uses recursion and functions to make it easier to write (and because i'm generally comfortable in it), i have written it in VBScript. So this means it won't work on linux as far as i know, sorry. Feel free to convert it or whatevs

WHAT DOES IT DO??????//

1. finds an APK

2. unpacks it in a folder

3. optimises the PNGs (if you want it to)

4. repacks all files as deflate except a blacklist of filetypes*

5. repacks the blacklisted filetypes* as STORE

6. zipaligns the new APK

7. copies it back to the original location, overwriting the original APK

8. finds the next APK, and repeat from step 2

* the blacklisted file types are easily editable. just find the STOREFileNames variable. by default the filetypes are:

"*.arsc", "*.m10", "*.png", "*.wav", "*.ogg", "*.mp4", "*.jpl", "*.jpeg", "*.gif","*.mp2", "*.mp3", _

"*.aac","*.mpg", "*.mpeg", "*.mid", "*.midi", "*.smf", "*.jet","*.rtttl", "*.imy", "*.xmf", _

"*.m4a","*.m4v", "*.3gp", "*.3gpp", "*.3g2", "*.3gpp2", "*.amr", "*.awb", "*.wma", "*.wmv", _

"*.so", "*.dat", "*.bin"

WHY DO YOU WANT THIS??

If certain filetypes in the APK are compressed as STORE (which means they aren't compressed at all), then Android can use them directly. If they are stored as DEFLATE (like all other file types should be), then Android must first decompress the APK somewhere. This means slower apps, more cache, and it's just not how things are supposed to be done. This script makes sure that all files inside all APKs are stored as they should be, and it will optimise PNG files and zipalign the final APK as it goes.

This script is really meant for ROM chefs to run against their ROMs before releasing them, but if you (a mere user) have a ROM that your chef hasn't run this script on, then you can extract the ROM, run the script on it, then recompress the ROM and flash it.

HOW DOES IT DO IT?????///////

It uses the command line version of 7-Zip. Download it from here:

http://7-zip.org/download.html

It uses zipalign.exe from the android SDK. if you don't know where this comes from.. maybe you shouldn't be using this script :)

It uses a cool OptiPNG utility to optimise the PNGs if you want it to. This slows the processing down a lot.. but it's up to you if you wanna do it. You'll need to download the utility from here:

http://optipng.sourceforge.net/

WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO MAKE IT WORK//////?

Grab the script, put it in the same folder as the root of your ROM (the script will repack all APKs in the subfolders from where it's sitting, including the APKs in the folder the script is in).

open up the script, there are 5 variables you MUST verify, most likely you will have to change them.. unless you put things on a D and E drive and your name is Nick..

tempAPKextract = "E:\Temp\tempAPKExtract"

tempAPKBuild = "E:\Temp\tempAPKBuild"

sevenZipLoc = """D:\nick\android\7za\7za.exe"""

zipAlignLoc = """D:\nick\android\android-sdk-windows\tools\zipalign.exe"""

optiPNGLoc = """D:\android\7-zipA\ROM\optipng.exe"""

the first two temp ones can be anywhere.. just make sure at least the sub folders up to "tempAPK..." exist (eg in this case the E:\Temp folder must already be there)

the next three are the locations of the tools required for the script to work, edit to please!

Run the script. If you have set verboseOutput to true (it's false by default), then I would highly recommend you run the script from the commandline with the command:

cscript fixAllAPKs.vbs

anyways, hope it's useful to you.

DOWNLOAD

CHANGELOG????/

v1.5.1 - cleaned up some code, added in verboseOutput so you can watch the progress as it's fixing (must run as cscript!)

v1.5 - added OptiPNG to the script, enabled by default. Quite slow. Added some more file types.

v1.4.3 - added more file types to STORE, thanks gtg465x

v1.4.1 - minor code clean up, fixed some comments.

v1.4 - fixed the problem where the script wouldn't fix any APKs in the root folder that the script was in

v1.3 - almost doubled the speed of the script. fixed some naughty bugs