Being a blogger, especially for the tech industry, time to time I come across utilities and tools that are so basic and simple in their working, yet package such convenience that one cannot help but question how we’d survived until now without such a thing. For people who play around a lot with Android and love to modify their devices, having multiple sets of different APKs on their computer is nothing too surprising or even worrisome. What’s annoying, however, is to have several APK files lying around in a folder that you cannot recognize, nor can you even tell what they are unless you install them.
Installing an APK that you’ve just grabbed off the internet directly to your device is a bad idea for various obvious reasons. Unfortunately, there aren’t many possibilities to look into what an APK does without sideloading it onto an Android smartphone or tablet. That’s exactly what the app in question, APK-Info, aims to address.
APK-Info is a simple Windows-based application that will look at an APK file, analyze it and provide certain valuable pieces of information pertaining to that application package.
The program captures information such as the name of the application, the icon that will be displayed, version information, package name, SDK version and more. More important pieces of information include what permissions would the APK command, what screen resolutions does it support, what are the features, and a link to the Google Play Store entry for the said application, should that exist. APK-Info even allows you to easily rename the APK file for better identification in the future.
The highly-useful tool is available completely free, and was originally released over at the Total Commander forums. From there, it was taken up by an XDA-Developers forum member who’s updated the utility to provide more updated information, such as the new Android SDK versions, Play Store links instead of the old Android Market etc. Whether the development continues or not, we’ll have to see.
From my point of view, I find APK-Info to be a very valuable addition to my existing arsenal of Android-related utilities. Since the application is free, it won’t hurt for you to give it a try either – you may end up using it on a daily basis!
(Source: XDA Developers forum thread)
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