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I am unable to save APK's that I have purchased (actually paid for) through the Play store. Usually SaveAPK is able to save the APKs that I'm interested it, however this didn't work: it sais Copy failed. I also tried Astro File Manager, but every app that I purchased had a lock symbol on it, and it didn't allow me to back it up.

Next, I tried looking in /data/app, and I couldn't find the APK either. Any ideas where they could be? Maybe it's some sort of copy protection in 4.x+ which I haven't heard of previously.

I am running Cyanogenmod 10.1-20130714-NIGHTLY-i9300

Sasha
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2 Answers2

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Yes, this is a new feature (app encryption with forward locking) introduced in Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) which is intended to prevent casual copying of .apk files. See this blog post for a more detailed description of this feature, with some technical details.

Part of the post text which is most relevant to this question:

A typical forward locked app's mount point now looks like this:

shell@android:/mnt/asec/org.mypackage-1 # ls -l
ls -l
drwxr-xr-x system   system            2012-07-16 15:07 lib
drwx------ root     root              1970-01-01 09:00 lost+found
-rw-r----- system   u0_a96    1319057 2012-07-16 15:07 pkg.apk
-rw-r--r-- system   system     526091 2012-07-16 15:07 res.zip

Here the res.zip holds app resources and is world-readable, while the pkg.apk file which hold the full APK is only readable by the system and the app's dedicated user (u0_a96).

So a normal app like SaveAPK cannot read .apk files of forward locked apps in JB (but app resources are still world-readable, therefore apps which contain icon sets and themes for other apps will still work properly).

However, this protection is effective only in the locked-down state of Android as shipped by device manufacturers. If you have root, you can still access .apk files of all applications installed on your device and do whatever you want with them. The only problem for you is that some backup apps you have used previously will no longer work, and you need to find a working replacement (now a backup app will need to use root access in order to backup all .apk files).

Sergey Vlasov
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  • "In Jelly Bean, the forward locking implementation has been re-designed and now offers the ability to store APKs in an encrypted container that requires a device-specific key to be mounted at runtime. Let's look into the implementation in a bit more detail." Great. – Sasha Jul 14 '13 at 18:08
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.apk files are usually installed in /data/app, as you already pointed to. I find my "bought apps" in this place as well; so it might be you've looked for the wrong name: the files usually have the "syntax" <package_name>-<n>.apk, where <package_name> is the app's package name as it appears in the URL when looking it app in Google Play via the web browser, and <n> is a digit. I bought e.g. ROM Toolbox, and can find it here as com.jrummy.liberty.toolboxpro-1.apk.

There are several options to get hold of an app's .apk file:

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Izzy
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  • I looked at the folder with ES File manager, which showed icons for the apk's. I also looked for the 'syntax' of the app, which also wasn't there. Appmonster listed the app as 'Protected', and backing it up just gave me an icon, as well as a text file. Titanium backup, on the other hand, gave me a .apk.gz file, however I am unsure if this is the actual APK. – Sasha Jul 14 '13 at 18:05
  • If it's protected, it probably cannot be retrieved without root. And yes, that .apk.gz file actually is a GZip-compressed .apk -- so you can simply gunzip it to get the "plain" .apk. – Izzy Jul 14 '13 at 21:57