Decompiling the application's native libraries

Android native libraries are pretty easy to decompile; they are, after all, just C/C++ object files and binaries compiled from the ARM platform. So decompiling them is as simple as finding a decompiler like the "ever-popular" objdump decompiler for Linux that accommodates ARM binaries, and, as it turns out, this problem has been solved for us by the Android NDK.

Before we get into the details of this process, you need to make sure you have the right tools.

Getting ready

Getting ready for this recipe is as easy as making sure you have a fresh copy of the Android NDK package; you can grab a copy at http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html.

How to do it...

Decompiling a native library is as simple as invoking one of the tools provided with the Android NDK toolchain known as objdump; it has been prebuilt to include all of the plugins that allow objdump to interpret the endianness and code structures specific to the ARM binaries.

To decompile...