[self-help] How to make ugly apps look great on your Onyx

[machinogodzilla]

It always annoys me when I download another Android app that actually works and would be very useful to have on my ereader but the UI looks plain ugly. The ugliness per se is not a problem, but try to read pastel text on white background or a very fashionable these days grey text on grey background and soon you will be heading for the delete button.

However, if you are willing to put some effort into it, there appears to be a way for making design corrections.

Here is an example. A popular off-line dictionary app ColorDict looks like this straight from Play store:



You can't see what you type, you can't see the history, the icons are too pale, and you can't see what dictionaries you have and enable/disable them. Well you can try blindly but it's not very nice. With a bit of tweaking though:



I will soon be writing a little tutorial how to go about making such corrections (if there is interest). Meanwhile, do you know any ugly ducklings that you would want to use but the UI stops you from putting them on your ereader?

[stardest]

Oh that is very helpful indeed! Off the top of my head ES File Explorer, when you click on the side menu (top left corner) the menu options are pretty dark.

[increduloussus]

Wow, yes, that would be amazing. One of the biggest problems I'm seeing with the N96 so far is the issue of greyish text on greyish backgrounds. Wish I could universally correct this, and make ALL TEXT default to black, and all backgrounds default to white. The contrast on these screens is bad enough to begin with!

[gdornick]

Oh yes, that would be very helpful.
I am experiencing the same problem with ColorDict.
Another app which I found difficult to work with is Titanium Backup (buttons are not readable).
I also have installed an old version of OneNote. If I open a note, the screen is black, the other screens are readable, but the notes themselves are not. Not sure if this is a OneNote bug (because it is an older version 15.0.2020 that can run on Android 4.0) or the same problem as ColorDict, which hopefully can be solved with your tutorial.

[stjoe]

Yes, looking forward for the tutorial..

[gdornick]

Hi Machinogodzilla,

I was wondering if there is any progress with the tutorial. I still hope you would like to share your tweaks with us. Let me know if I can help you with it.

[Kumabjorn]

This needs to be bumped.

Sent from my GT-N8010 using Tapatalk 4

[filippo80x]

Same problem with com.styluslabs.write and android.androidVNC. A tutorial to solve this issue would be of great help!

[plusz]

Nice idea to share this - better yet we should share fixed apps, with screenshots etc. Regarding free apps there should be no problem, at least not moral problem, right?

Any idea where to host patched apk's with tutorial what was changed and pictures?

Simple tutorial how I do it:
0. Prerequisite: AndroidStudio and ability to compile/run/understand any very simple hello world example app. The tools which comes with it are needed, plus you need the very basic understanding of an apk resources.
1. Download apktool https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/
2. Install it on your system
3. Use apktool on the desired apk to disassemble it apktool d your.apk- you should not be interested in reading/understanding smali files but if you do, check also smaliidea plugin to be able to debug your changes in smali files https://github.com/JesusFreke/smali/wiki/smalidea
4. Modify icons and colors - usually you will find all color constants used by the app in colors.xml file (res\values\colors.xml)
5. Use apktool to build apk from the unpacked an modified folder apktool b yourFolder
6. Sign the apk https://support.symantec.com/en_US/a...WTO124063.html
7. The app your_signed.apk is ready to be installed adb install your_signed.apk or copy it to sd card and execute in the device to install it

You may actually want smalidea plugin to be able to preview your layout/color changes in the AndroidStudio designer view

For step #6 make sure the unsigned apk name does not contain spaces if you want to use the shell script downloaded from the web - it has a bug, does not handle names like "your tool 2.apk"

[mdp]

Originally Posted by plusz

Any idea where to host patched apk's with tutorial what was changed and pictures?

Apart from this very thread?

I posted in this forum several patched .apk , though none to fix readability. To upload them, I just append a .zip to the filename and in the description I advise to remove it.

[machinogodzilla]

I'm sorry for not responding earlier, busy with other things lately...

The steps are basically what plusz listed but I will dump my notes from when I was playing with ColorDict anyway, even though there is an overlap, in case that helps somebody.

The steps are only to get to the guts of an app and then put it back together. Once you've accessed the internals you will need Android Studio for making the actual changes to the look of the app. This editor comes with a visual editor that makes it easier to manipulate the XML files that define the UI of the app, that's all you need this editor for. Here is an example screenshot (the definition file, one of many, is on the left and the preview on the right).

Once reassembled you will probably want to install and try your app on a phone as it is less painful than using an ereader for this, especially that it is likely you will go over this process multiple times before you get the look you are after.

The Process

Get the apk file, for example, colordict.apk.

APK is nothing more than a ZIP with compiled source code of the app. You can extract the archive but everything will be garbled, even resource text files such as XML files will be unreadable. You need to disassemble resources to nearly original form with apktool:

$ apktool d colordict.apk 
I: Using Apktool 2.1.1 on colordict.apk
...

Now you can open the unpacked directory in Android Studio and tinker with the content.

Once you've finished editing the UI you have to rebuild the app:

$ apktool b colordict
// builds colordict folder into colordict/dist/colordict.apk file

In order to run the rebuilt application you must resign it. You can sign the app from the command line using standard tools from the Android SDK and the JDK.

Generate a private key using keytool:

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore <my-release-key>.keystore -alias <some-alias> -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

// for example

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore release_key.keystore -alias modified_app -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

This example prompts you for passwords for the keystore and key, and to provide the Distinguished Name fields for your key. It then generates the keystore as a file called release_key.keystore. The keystore contains a single key, valid for 10000 days. The alias is a name that you will use later when signing your app.

Sign your app with your private key using jarsigner:

$ jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore release_key.keystore colordict.apk modified_app

This example prompts you for passwords for the keystore and key. It then modifies the APK in-place to sign it.

Verify that your APK is signed. For example:

$ jarsigner -verify -verbose -certs colordict.apk

Align the final APK package using zipalign.

$ zipalign -v 4 colordict.apk colordict_aligned.apk

zipalign ensures that all uncompressed data starts with a particular byte alignment relative to the start of the file, which reduces the amount of RAM consumed by an app.

You can install and run the app now.

To make it easier to yourself you can bundle all these commands into a single script:

#!/bin/bash

apktool b colordict
cp colordict/dist/colordict.apk .
jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore release_key.keystore colordict.apk modified_app
rm colordict_aligned.apk
zipalign -v 4 colordict.apk colordict_aligned.apk
echo "DONE!"

[Kumabjorn]

But you can't upload those revised apps as specific e-ink editions to Play Store?

[mdp]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

But you can't upload those revised apps as specific e-ink editions to Play Store?

The Play Store is for the original authors.
Customizations, I (for instance) publish here (in the forum).
I suggested that this thread could host .apk of customizations to fix readibility on EPD.

[Kumabjorn]

That would certainly be a welcome solution.

[machinogodzilla]

I suppose once you've done all this heavy lifting you could contact the original authors, explain the problem, show them your work, your prototype and maybe they would incorporate (and improve upon) the changes into their app by, say, introducing an ereader friendly theme. That's much nicer than simply going to them and demanding stuff, especially when the app is free.