Apktool/ROADMAP.md

Automatic Remapping of ResourceId

We currently prevent resourceIds from changing, by utilizing the public.xml file which makes the resources public, but then prevents them to be used in some locations (android:scheme). The correct fix would be to record the resourceIds and use dexlib2 (no regular expressions) to rewrite them to the new resourceId after the resources.arsc is built.

This would be a lookup table of old->new resourceIds leveraging the API of dexlib2 to do the replacement. Doing this properly would nullify the need to do #191

Suggestions: #244 Discussions: #2062

Implicit Qualifiers Cleanup

Currently we have a mismatch between reading the folders and reading the qualifiers which leads to a mismatch between implicit qualifiers like version (-v4, v13, etc).

This was first spotted in bug #1272.

This was attempted to be fixed in !1758, but had to be reverted due to this.

Suggestions: #2237

Qualifier Plugin System

For some OEMs, past and present. They re-use qualifiers that AOSP ends up using. This with CTS is becoming very rare and pretty much a problem of the past, but now custom modifications and more "off the cuff" OEMs are doing it.

Apktool can't do anything because it stays true to AOSP. It would need a plugin system that controls how to read the qualifiers. Or even an override file.

Suggestions: #1420, #2474

Non-reference Resources

Some applications may shove resources into the /res folder, but have no references to them. Apktool follows the resource table, so these files are effectively abandoned.

Crawling the filesystem for non-checked files would be slow especially having to cross check with already parsed files.

Suggestions: #1366

Multi-threaded

Applications are getting larger as well as frameworks, but Apktool is getting slower.

Suggestions: #2685

Android Support

Folks have requested running Apktool on device itself. This has been a challenge due to the arch requirements that would be placed on the aapt2/aapt binaries.

Suggestions: #2811

Split APK Support

Applications are further getting split on qualifiers. Apktool has been built on the assumption of one apk.

Suggestions: #2283, #2218, #2880

Dummy Resources

Folks want the ability to stop the auto generation of dummy resources.

Suggestions: #2683, #2104 Pull Request(s): #2463