Obtain package name AND common name of apps via ADB

Question

I'm looking for a possibility to retrieve both, the package names and the common names of apps installed on an Android device via ADB – or at least to retrieve the common name if the package name is known. A quick search on our site brought up two related questions, but they don't solve my issue:

• How do I get the common name of an app having the package name (like com.android.blabla)? (command line or included app) doesn't work via ADB (but uses an app you've got to lookup with manually), matching the request of the OP
• How to find app based on package name? just reverts to an URL lookup at Google Play, which doesn't always fit (as not all apps are available there).

I'm looking for a way to retrieve the information directly from the device, if possible – not "any" way (including "web lookups" or "via an app") as those two questions have it.

I know there are multiple tools available to obtain package details:

• adb dumpsys package: While this lists all packages with a bunch of details, the "common name" is not shown
• adb shell pm list: only gives the package names
• aapt would be able to obtain the common name, but would require to first pull the .apk file from the device, which is not really convenient (and obviously will be pretty slow with many and/or large apps installed)

Did I miss something? I know the information must be on the device (how else could it show the app names in the GUI? I doubt Android parses the .apk file each time the GUI need the "common name"). So is there a way to get hold of it, using ADB directly?

---

TL;DR

Background (if somebody's curious): I want to be able to quickly obtain a list of user-apps from any of my devices, without having to revert to acrobatics. A list of their package names I can retrieve using adb shell pm list -3, but as those are package names only, recognizing apps is a guess-work. So if there were some ADB command to retrieve the common name for a given package name, I could simply use a loop like for pkg in $(adb shell pm list -3); do echo "- $(adb <whatever_the_command_is> $pkg) ($pkg)"; done – and get a listing of all the installed user-apps in a "human readable format" together with their package names.

Use-cases:

• See what "superflous" apps are installed (which I could remove)
• Cross-check lists from multiple devices
• Documentation ;)
• and probably more (but the above 3 are what I need it for)

Answer 1

Here is my solution for a non-rooted phone which needed some slight changes from above which I ran on a Moto G 2nd gen running Android 5.0.2.

I didn't have aapt binary in /system/bin, so I first tried downloading from https://android.izzysoft.de/downloads

but when I tried to run it, I got an error saying:

error: only position independent executables (PIE) are supported.

So then I searched for a PIE version and found: https://github.com/Calsign/APDE/blob/fdc22eb31048862e1484f4b6eca229accda61466/APDE/src/main/assets/aapt-binaries/aapt-arm-pie

and this worked by copying binary to /data/local/tmp:

adb push aapt-arm-pie /data/local/tmp
adb shell chmod 0755 /data/local/tmp/aapt-arm-pie

So then:

adb shell pm list packages -3 -f

gets a list of 3rd party apps (apps you have installed, not system apps) and then you can use the package from the command above in aapt to get information on the package - example:

adb shell /data/local/tmp/aapt-arm-pie d badging /data/app/com.facebook.katana-3/base.apk

So, below is a script (for a Linux client) to get just "common" name for 3rd party apps:

for pkg in `adb shell pm list packages -3 -f | awk -F= '{sub("package:","");print $1}'`
do
  adb shell /data/local/tmp/aapt-arm-pie d badging $pkg | awk -F: '
      $1 == "application-label" {print $2}'
done

If you want package and version too, then change last but one line from:

$1 == "application-label" {print $2}'

to:

$1 == "package" { split($2,space," ")
name=space[1];version=space[3]}
$1 == "application-label" {print name, version, $2 }'

Example output:

name='com.ultimarom.launchnavigation' versionName='1.28' 'Navigation'
name='com.enhanced.skineditorstudio' versionName='3.3' 'Custom Skin Creator'
name='com.mojang.minecraftpe' versionName='1.2.6.60' 'Minecraft'
name='org.videolan.vlc' versionName='2.5.13' 'VLC'
name='com.jrustonapps.myauroraforecast' versionName='1.7.2' 'My Aurora Forecast'
name='de.j4velin.wifiAutoOff' versionName='1.7.6' 'WiFi Automatic'
name='com.facebook.katana' versionName='153.0.0.54.88' 'Facebook'
name='com.metago.astro' versionName='6.0.5' 'ASTRO File Manager'
name='za.co.hardrive.smartinfo.parkrun' versionName='2.0.2' 'My 5krun'
name='com.PYOPYO.StarTrackerVR' versionName='1.0.1' 'StarTracker VR'
name='cz.aponia.bor3.offlinemaps' versionName='1.1.19' 'Offline Maps'
name='com.groupon' versionName='16.11.63973' 'Groupon'
name='com.ebay.mobile' versionName='5.16.1.2' 'eBay'
name='com.runtastic.android' versionName='8.1.1' 'Runtastic
name='com.google.android.diskusage' versionName='3.8.3' 'DiskUsage'

Answer 2

^{This is not a final answer, as it is not generic (only works on some devices) – but it's a start at least:}

As we've figured out, at least CM based ROMs with Kitkat (Android 4.4) and above ship with the aapt binary available in /system/bin¹. If your ROM doesn't have it, and installing the binary on the device is an option, you can find it here.

Using aapt, retrieving the app name is possible with

aapt d badging <path to apk> | grep "application: label" |awk '{print $2}'

The output will be something like label='Funny App', which you then easily can parse for the app name, e.g.

aapt d badging <path to apk> | grep 'application: label' | sed -n \"s/.*label\='\([^']*\)'.*/\1/p\"

(not good if the app name contains single quotes, but that might count as cosmetics – or you figure how to improve the sed part to deal with that).

---

^{1: we didn't find this in the Kitkat-and-above stock ROMs we've checked, so it might be CM based ROMs only}

Answer 3

This can be achieved with Android Java API:

import android.app.ActivityThread;
import android.content.pm.ApplicationInfo;
import android.content.pm.PackageManager;
import android.os.Looper;
public class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Looper.prepareMainLooper();
    PackageManager pm = ActivityThread.systemMain().getSystemContext().getPackageManager();
    for (ApplicationInfo appInfo : pm.getInstalledApplications(PackageManager.MATCH_UNINSTALLED_PACKAGES)) {
      System.out.println(appInfo.uid + " " + appInfo.packageName + " " + pm.getApplicationLabel(appInfo));
    }
  }
}

Compile the code to a dex file, push it to /data/local/tmp/list_app_labels.dex, and run from ADB shell:

CLASSPATH=/data/local/tmp/list_app_labels.dex app_process / Main

It should print the UID, package name and app label of installed apps like this:

10099 com.android.packageinstaller Package installer
1002 com.android.bluetooth Bluetooth
1073 com.android.networkstack.permissionconfig com.android.server.NetworkPermissionConfig
10230 com.topjohnwu.magisk Magisk
10087 com.android.providers.blockednumber Blocked Numbers Storage
10176 com.termux.widget Termux:Widget
...

If you don't want to compile the code, here are convenience methods:

Option 1

Download the pre-compiled executable (for arm64 or arm), extract the zip file, push the binary to Android device, and run:

adb push list_app_labels /data/local/tmp/ && adb shell 'cd /data/local/tmp/ && chmod a+x list_app_labels && ./list_app_labels'

Option 2

Push the given script to Android device and run:

adb push list_app_labels.sh /data/local/tmp/ && adb shell sh /data/local/tmp/list_app_labels.sh

Tested on Android 7-13.

Note:

• Do not change the script. tail extracts the dex from a hard-coded line number.
• If you are on Windows, run dos2unix on the shell script before executing.

list_app_labels.sh:

#!/system/bin/sh
export CLASSPATH=/data/local/tmp/list_app_labels.dex
trap 'rm $CLASSPATH' EXIT
tail -n +10 "$0" | base64 -d >$CLASSPATH
app_process / Main
exit
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Answer 4

None of the suggestions were particularly good for me, so after some fiddling, here's my 100% on-device solution using Termux:

Get Termux and install adb and aapt through its package manager:

pkg install android-tools aapt

You need to be connected to a Wi-Fi network - any network will do - to pair Termux's ADB to your phone for "wireless" debugging.

Now here's the script I've made, with comments to make it easier to read and tweak (and also for me to understand as I've never been that good at shell scripting):

# ,- list all packages including APK path, in the format: package:/data/.../path/to.apk=com.package.name
# |  note that the path to the APK includes equals signs
# |  
# |                                              ,- replace the last "=" (before the package name) with a ":"
# |                                              |
# |                                              |                       ,- remove leading "package:"
# |                                              |                       |                              ,- parse into shell vars $apk and $pkgname
# |                                              |                       |                              |
adb shell cmd package list packages -f | sed -e 's/=\([^=]*\)$/:\1/' -e 's/^package://' - | while IFS=: read -r apk pkgname; do
  # get label using aapt and filter out just the label with sed
  label=$(aapt dump badging $apk | sed --quiet --expression='s/^application-label://p')
  echo "pkgname: $pkgname"
  echo "apk: $apk"
  echo "label: $label"
  echo ""
done

Save this to a file somewhere in the termux home folder for easy access (e.g. ~/list.sh), and run it with sh list.sh

It takes about a second per app for aapt to process the apk, but it doesn't need to copy it anywhere - it accesses the apk directly where it is. The output is easily tweakable in the script as it's just a few echo commands. You can also change which files get listed by changing the arguments of adb shell cmd package, e.g. by adding -3, but be sure to keep the -f flag.

This may not be useful for the original question asker, but I do hope it would be useful to others!