unexplainable problems after recompilation with apktool

something i have seen many times is when a program is recompiled it has strange errors. perhaps a progress bar is not showing up correctly, the layout is somehow distorted or there are strange force closes that happen. in my experience the reason for this is almost always apktool's handling of resources.

if you are having trouble, try simply dumping and building without changing anything with apktool. if there is a problem, then apktool is the culprit. i suggest making an issue on apktool's page here: http://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/issues/entry

you don't have to go into detail about what you're using apktool for. there are lots of legitimate reasons such as adding localization. it should suffice to mention in the report that simply dumping/building results in a distorted .apk.

if you are merely modifying smali code and don't need to modify the resources, try using the --no-res option, or you could just use smali/baksmali. if you are trying to modify an .xml resource then you might have to do it manually.

working with smali means working with the classes.dex file in the apk, and not the apk itself. you will also have to handle resigning and zipaligning (optional) yourself