baksmali is the companion disassembler to smali, the dex assembler that I released recently. I’ve released a new version of smali as well, with a number of improvements/fixes. This is the v0.91 release of both tools.

As you might imagine, baksmali is able to disassemble a dex file into a set of text files, one for each class, containing the methods, field, annotations, debug info and dalvik bytecode for that class.

And then smali can munch on those text files and assemble them into shiny new classes.dex file, which you can repackage back into an apk/jar/zip file and throw on your android-based phone.

And most importantly, you can make magic happen when you make changes between the 2 steps.

Both tools are released as executable jar files. You can invoke them and get the usage information with

java -jar smali-0.91.jar
java -jar baksmali-0.91.jar

Unfortunately, the current incarnation of the tools are somewhat porcine. If you try to assemble/disassemble a large dex file and get an out-of-memory type error, try running with -Xmx512m, which increases the max java heap size to 512MB

java -Xmx512m -jar smali-0.91.jar [options]
java -Xmx512m -jar baksmali-0.91.jar [options]


The main project page for smali/baksmali is http://smali.googlecode.com