recompile - apktool build apk fails

Question

I am experiencing very annoying problems with the application apktool problem. I do not understand what i am doing wrong, or what the problem is. I tried this on debian , and on linux mint. I used different versions of apktool,

resulting in the same error:

I: Checking whether sources has changed...
I: Checking whether resources has changed...
I: Building resources...
Exception in thread "main" brut.androlib.AndrolibException: brut.common.BrutException: could not exec command: [aapt, p, -F, /tmp/APKTOOL3630495287059303807.tmp, -I, /home/awesomename/apktool/framework/1.apk, -S, /home/awesomename/out/./res, -M, /home/awesomename/out/./AndroidManifest.xml]
    at brut.androlib.res.AndrolibResources.aaptPackage(Unknown Source)
    at brut.androlib.Androlib.buildResourcesFull(Unknown Source)
    at brut.androlib.Androlib.buildResources(Unknown Source)
    at brut.androlib.Androlib.build(Unknown Source)
    at brut.androlib.Androlib.build(Unknown Source)
    at brut.apktool.Main.cmdBuild(Unknown Source)
    at brut.apktool.Main.main(Unknown Source)
Caused by: brut.common.BrutException: could not exec command: [aapt, p, -F, /tmp/APKTOOL3630495287059303807.tmp, -I, /home/windows/apktool/framework/1.apk, -S, /home/windows/out/./res, -M, /home/windows/out/./AndroidManifest.xml]
    at brut.util.OS.exec(Unknown Source)
    ... 7 more
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "aapt": error=2, No such file or directory
    at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:1041)
    at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:617)
    at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:485)
    ... 8 more
Caused by: java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory
    at java.lang.UNIXProcess.forkAndExec(Native Method)
    at java.lang.UNIXProcess.<init>(UNIXProcess.java:135)
    at java.lang.ProcessImpl.start(ProcessImpl.java:130)
    at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:1022)
    ... 10 more

It seems it can not use aapt , but i read about apktool. And it seems that aapt is build inside apktool , why is it not working ?

Answer 1

It seems there's some problem in building the resources while recompiling the apk. what you can do is, when you decompile your apk use this command

apktool d -f -r apkfilename.apk

here -f is to replace previous decompiled apk's code and -r is to ignore the decompiling of resources.

this would prevent the resources from being decompiled and will simply copy the same resources when you recompile the apk.