Being a blogger, especially for the tech industry, time to time I
come across utilities and tools that are so basic and simple in their
working, yet package such convenience that one cannot help but question
how we’d survived until now without such a thing. For people who play
around a lot with Android and love to modify their devices, having
multiple sets of different APKs on their computer is nothing too
surprising or even worrisome. What’s annoying, however, is to have
several APK files lying around in a folder that you cannot recognize,
nor can you even tell what they are unless you install them.
Installing
an APK that you’ve just grabbed off the internet directly to your
device is a bad idea for various obvious reasons. Unfortunately, there
aren’t many possibilities to look into what an APK does without
sideloading it onto an Android smartphone or tablet. That’s exactly what
the app in question, APK-Info, aims to address.
APK-Info
is a simple Windows-based application that will look at an APK file,
analyze it and provide certain valuable pieces of information
pertaining to that application package.
The program captures
information such as the name of the application, the icon that will be
displayed, version information, package name, SDK version and more.
More important pieces of information include what permissions would the
APK command, what screen resolutions does it support, what are the
features, and a link to the Google Play Store entry for the said
application, should that exist. APK-Info even allows you to easily
rename the APK file for better identification in the future.
The highly-useful tool is available completely free, and was originally released over at the
Total Commander forums. From there, it was taken up by an
XDA-Developers
forum member who’s updated the utility to provide more updated
information, such as the new Android SDK versions, Play Store links
instead of the old Android Market etc. Whether the development continues
or not, we’ll have to see.
From
my point of view, I find APK-Info to be a very valuable addition to my
existing arsenal of Android-related utilities. Since the application
is free, it won’t hurt for you to give it a try either – you may end up
using it on a daily basis!
API levels added:
15 - 4.0.3-4 - Ice Cream Sandwich MR1
16 - 4.1.x - Jelly Bean
17 - 4.2.x - Jelly Bean MR1
18 - 4.3 - Jelly Bean MR2
(APK-Info v0.3 - 2013.07.24)
GUI changes:
Expanded some labels for better readability
Updated App store related strings, e.g. > 'Visit Market'
market.android.com > 'Play Store'
play.google.com
Removed underscore from 'NewFileName' and 'v' from version string; e.g. >
App Name_1.1.apk
Other:
Updated
aapt.exe to a more effecient binary
New Icon
DOWNLOAD @
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ep...-Info_v0.3.zip
md5: 8b6744e3291913183cc744009aebfa85
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