An Android application is an archive file of the data and resource files created while developing the application. The extension of an Android application is .apk
, meaning application package, which includes the following files and folders in most cases:
Classes.dex
(file)AndroidManifest.xml
(file)META-INF
(folder)resources.arsc
(file)res
(folder)assets
(folder)lib
(folder)
In order to verify this, we could simply unzip the application using any archive manager application, such as 7zip, WinRAR, or any preferred application. On Linux or Mac, we could simply use the unzip command in order to show the contents of the archive package, as shown in the following screenshot:
Here, we have used the -l
(list) flag in order to simply show the contents of the archive package instead of extracting it. We could also use the file
command in order to see whether it is a valid archive package.
An Android application consists of various components, which together create the...