Pulling APK Files From Android Device With Bugjaeger Select the apps that you want to copy from the list and tap on INSTALL.Pick "Select from installed Apps" option and tap on OK.Connect the devices with USB OTG cable and confirm the authorization dialogs (similar to what you do when you're using regular ADB).The device that contains the original APK file should have Bugjaeger installed. If you don't want to install ADB on your PC, you can do the same stuff as described before using the Bugjaeger app. To copy the APK and data from the generated backup file to your target Android device, use the restore command adb restore app.backup Copy APK with Bugjaeger Therefore you might need to add quotes to arguments or experiment with different ADB versions. In some cases this might not work reliably. This will backup the APK file and app data for your specified package into app.backup file. Type in your password and tap on "BACK UP MY DATA". You should execute the following command to create a backup adb backup -apk -f app.backup Ī dialog box asking for password and confirmation should appear on your Android device. The flags show that it should be possible to perform a backup for this specific app. This gave me the following output for my DevOwner app flags= To check if a particular app supports backup do the following adb shell pm dump | grep ALLOW_BACKUP Luckily, the apps that target Android 6 and higher have this value set to true by default, so even if the developer did not set this flag explicitly to true, it should still be possible to perform a backup. Only apps that set the allowBackup flag to true in their AndroidManifest.xml can be copied. The disadvantage is that not all apps can be copied this way. This method has the advantage that you can also copy app's data together with the APK. However, app's data won't get erased with this option. The -r option means that the app should be reinstalled in case it already exists on the target device. This will push the APK to the target device and execute the pm install -r command on the device. Install APK to target Android device adb install -r pulled.apk You should use the path to APK obtained in the previous step This will pull the APK file to current directory. Pull the APK file from Android device to your PC adb pull /path/to/apk
These files are usually highly customized for the device they were deployed to and are additionally running a bit differently than apps installed from regular APKs, so the method I'm describing here won't work for this kind of APK files. This usually happens when using the Instant Run feature of Android Studio. Note: Sometimes the app is split into multiple APK files. I described this method in one of my posts. Once it's foreground, you can get the package name with adb shell dumpsys window windows | grep "mCurrentFocus". You can search the app on the list by its name.Īlternatively, you can start the app you want to copy. The main screen will display a list of installed apps and package names. If you're not sure how to get the package name of the app you want to copy, you can use my Power APK app for this. I used the package name from my example app from the post about device owner - eu.vowner. You should substitute your package name in the previous command. The pm command executed above should print something like this package:/data/app/eu.vowner-neU2X8B9ICkjedaHEdOzkA=/base.apk
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If you want to bring your Android skills to the next level, I highly recommend checking out some of the Udemy courses. If you just want to copy one specific APK, ADB can be used to grab a copy of APK or create a backup file with the APK and related data. In addition to Tap & Go, Android also allows you to copy apps and data using ADB. The usual way of transferring apps from your old device to a new one is by using the Tap & Go feature. Android offers multiple ways to transfer apps and data between phones.