A new, unified, application analysis utility

[grendello]

Summary

Add apput (under tools/apput/), a standalone .NET console tool for inspecting and extracting data from Android application packages produced by .NET for Android. It replaces several separate ad-hoc utilities with a single, extensible tool that can auto-detect file formats and operate on APKs, AABs, assembly stores, ELF shared libraries, individual .NET assemblies, PDBs, and binary Android manifests.

Usage

dotnet run --project tools/apput/src/apput.csproj -- <input_file>
dotnet run --project tools/apput/src/apput.csproj -- --help

The default command is report, which generates a Markdown analysis of the input file. Pass -l - to output the report to the console with VT100 color rendering.

Available commands

Command	Description
report <input_file>	Generate a full Markdown report (default)
extract assembly [options] <input_file> [patterns...]	Extract .NET assemblies and PDBs from APK/AAB/assembly stores
extract manifest <input_file>	Extract AndroidManifest.xml as plain XML

Examples

# Analyze an APK (default report command)
./dotnet-local.sh run --project tools/apput/src/apput.csproj -- path/to/app.apk

# Extract all assemblies from an AAB
./dotnet-local.sh run --project tools/apput/src/apput.csproj -- extract assembly -o ./out path/to/app.aab

# Extract manifest
./dotnet-local.sh run --project tools/apput/src/apput.csproj -- extract manifest path/to/app.apk

Supported file formats

The tool auto-detects the input format via Detector.FindAspect():

• APK / AAB — Android application packages
• Assembly store (v2/v3) — compressed assembly collections (including assemblies.*.blob.so)
• .NET assemblies — individual PE/MSIL .dll files
• PDB debug symbol files
• ELF shared libraries — with sub-type detection for NativeAOT, Mono AOT, Xamarin runtime, .NET Android wrapper, and assembly-embedded .so files
• Binary AndroidManifest.xml

Architecture & extensibility

apput is designed around an Aspect abstraction — each file format is an IAspect implementation that can be probed, loaded, reported on, and extracted from. New formats can be added by:

1. Implementing IAspect (with ProbeAspect / LoadAspect static methods)
2. Adding an [AspectReporter]-annotated reporter class
3. Optionally adding an [AspectExtractor]-annotated extractor class

Key entry points for programmatic use:

Class	Purpose
Detector	FindAspect(stream) / FindAspect(path) — detect file format
Extractor	Extract<TStored>(aspect, destination) — extract data from a container
Reporter	Report(aspect, ...) — generate Markdown report
LogBuffer	Implement and pass to Log.SetLogBuffer to capture log output programmatically

Notes

• The tool is not currently included in any .sln file — it is built standalone via dotnet run --project.
• Report output is Markdown, optionally color-rendered via VT100 when writing to an interactive terminal.
• Assembly extraction supports architecture filtering, glob/regex patterns, and optional PDB extraction.
• Future work: could be distributed as a dotnet tool, integrated into CI for APK analysis, or used as a library from Copilot skills or IDE extensions.