Assemble a dex file

Question

If you take an apk off the android filesystem and change the extention to .zip then open one of the xml files it won't work because it's encoded in dex. But you can run ./adb dexdump -l xml layout.xml > ~/Desktop/layout.xml then edit it to your likeing. I can't figure out how to get it back in the apk though. I think I need to encode it back into dex then just add it back in the archive. Can anyone tell me how to encode it into dex?

Answer 1

The binary XML format is unrelated to the Dalvik EXecutable format.

The "aapt" tool will re-package the APK. You will also need to re-sign it with the modified files.