zerdei's luyten, a worthwhile jd-gui alternative

if you use dex2jar + jd-gui and you find the results less than satisfying, that's normal. jd-gui hasn't been updated in at least 100 years. methods often fail to compile and blocks of code are sometimes omitted.

luyten, by deathmarine, which you can get here: https://github.com/deathmarine/Luyten/releases is a front end for procyon, a java decompiler. procyon+luyten has a higher success rate for decompiling methods in my experience, and has higher fidelity output, though it's more verbose. the UI isn't that great, but this pull request by zerdei includes several noteworthy improvements: https://github.com/deathmarine/Luyten/pull/13

feel free to clone and build the jar yourself, but if you're lazy, and somewhat trusting, i built this for you!
https://mega.co.nz/#!K95RlRiB!ak2DWRxC2DgPYDic0eDpQibAuGtIoFZGtU67GzyjEjM

sharing a good blog

found a nice blog about reversing and android cracking by Dan, who was kind enough to point out that the well-known site crackmes.de has some android crackmes (just search android).

his blog also introduced me to a tool called dex2jar that will sort of convert a classes.dex file into .java source. of course, it's not perfect and it's still new but it can be useful for getting a quick overview if the dalvik is too confusing.

here's Dan's article on android reversing: http://www.kizhakkinan.com/?p=39, check it out. it's got pictures!