[monalisa]

hi yall. I just wonder if and what kinds of tools you peeps use to reverse engineer mobile apps. I only know about unpacking and reading APK files using jadx which does not work for iOS and also sometimes I miss a dynamic reversing tool. On the other hand, the dedicated android emulator in Android Studio is a bit unwieldy and too much gobbledygook for me.
Does anyone know about a cli-based debugger/emulator for APKs?

Any responses would be greatly appreciated :)

[vagabond7639]

For Android, besides using Jadx for static analysis, you can check out Frida or Objection for dynamic analysis — they're both solid for runtime manipulation and can be run via CLI. Frida’s super handy for injecting scripts into running apps. As for an emulator, have you tried Genymotion? It's lighter than Android Studio’s default and works pretty well with ADB. For a pure CLI-based debugger, you can also check out gdb with some tweaks, or r2frida with Radare2 for more low-level stuff. Hope this help mate

[monalisa]

yes, thank you. I genuinely did not know about genymotion. the stuff gdb seems to only work for native apps, which is a shame. but a solid emulator was what I was looking for anyway : )