Apps Is it possible to de-compile an App Inventor app?

[A.Nonymous]

I've been wanting to develop apps for Android for awhile, but haven't had the time to sit down with a couple of books and actually teach myself Java. I did get an App Inventor invite though and messed around with it. I really like the way it's set up and how easy it is to develop apps. The problem with it that I've found is that you can't go in and look through the code. The apks it creates are usually pretty huge and it asks for weird permissions sometimes that there seems to be no reason for in the app. I created an app that if you press a button it plays a sound. The app wanted to be able to modify the contents of the SD card and have full Internet Access as well as Read Phone state and identity. This seemed absurd for the app. Fortunately I trust the developer if not his dev skills.

Anyway, I'm wondering if I can put together an app in App Inventor, have it create the apk and then de-compile it and tweak the source code in Eclipse. I could then see what code is there making the app work which would be extremely useful to me as a learning tool and I could weed out the unnecessary bloat in the app. It's my app so obviously there's nothing illegal here. Is this even possible?

 

[tencent]

I don't know if its possible however you are going to be a million times better off just learning how to program in Android. That app inventor is great if you want to impress your friends however if you want to do anything serious its going to have some major drawbacks and lack of control. If you know how to program in other OO languages then Java shouldn't be too hard to learn for you once you get past its quirks.

You'll be wasting time and effort starting out by using an editor like that, think of it like using web page builders. No matter how useful they are, you still have to be able to open the raw editor view and know your way around the code otherwise the entire tool will be useless and thats how I see that block builder being for you.

 

[Sam Voss]

I'm pretty sure no, because this was built to help beginner developers start developing, and understand whats going on, without knowing the code. In my opinion, dont even worry about the app developer, your best bet is in fact learning how to code it all yourself. I'm 16, and decided to learn one day, and figured its going to more of a drawback to try this out on the app developer, and just started out with the SDK and Eclipse, and I'm happy knowing I typed all of it, troubleshooted, and I know how to actually fix the bugs that arise. This also obviously increases customization.

So all-n-all, No i'm pretty sure you cant. Just start over, but keep an eye on what you did in the developer, then look up how to do it in Eclipse. Cheers