Apktool Upgrades

When patching Android applications, objection uses apktool to unpack and pack applications. Using the latest apktool is always recommended for various reasons.

Unfortunately many distributions don't package the latest apktool as part of the Operating Systems package manger meaning you have to install it manually.

which apktool to use

When patching an application using objection, objection knows where apktool is based on a PATH lookup. So, if you have apktool anywhere in your PATH, this is the one objection will use patch. If apktool is not in your PATH, objection will assume it is not correctly installed. To see which one exactly objection will use, you can run which apktool:

$ which apktool
/usr/local/bin/apktool

You can also see where else you may have apktool with whereis apktool:

$ whereis apktool
apktool: /usr/bin/apktool /usr/local/bin/apktool /usr/share/apktool /home/user/.local/bin/apktool /usr/share/man/man1/apktool.1.gz

apktool version

At the time of writing this article, objection required apktool version 2.4.1. This could change as time goes on but it's best to always have the latest version anyways. To check which version you have (and which version objection will think you have):

$ apktool -version
2.4.1

apktool update

The upgrade will depend heavily on your Operating System. You can try the package manager your OS uses to upgrade, and if it has the latest, hooray for you! If not, you can always download the latest version from the News section on the apktool website here and save the .jar file somewhere in your PATH. It is possible to download the .jar file directly into some place like /usr/local/bin/apktool as follows (as root):

$ curl -fsSL https://bitbucket.org/iBotPeaches/apktool/downloads/apktool_2.4.1.jar -o /usr/local/bin/apktool