dex2jar
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dex2jar is a set of tools to work with Android .dex and Java .class files, including converting .dex files to .class files zipped as jar.
Summary
dex2jar is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed set of command-line tools that converts Android .dex files into Java .class files packaged as a jar, alongside utilities for reading and writing Dalvik executables and disassembling dex into smali and back. You run it as a shell script against an APK, producing a jar you can hand to a Java decompiler, which makes it a fit for reverse engineers and Android security researchers examining app internals rather than for teams wanting a GUIGUIA graphical user interface, controls such as windows, buttons and menus. It lets people use software visually rather than entering commands. workflow. It sits in the Android reverse-engineering space alongside tools like smali/baksmali, whose disassembly syntax it deliberately matches while using its own implementation. The project dates to 2009 with 17 contributors, but there have been no commits in the past year and the last release was over four years ago, so treat it as stable rather than actively maintained.
dex2jar is a set of tools to work with Android .dex and Java .class files, including converting .dex files to .class files zipped as jar.
How dex2jar helps
Can I read the low-level instructions an app runs without reassembling a whole toolchain?
disassembles the dex into smali text files using the same syntax as smali/baksmali, so instruction-level review works with a familiar format even though the underlying implementation is separate
Have I altered an app's bytecode in a way that still produces a valid package?
reassembles edited smali files back into a dex, letting a modified instruction set be rebuilt into something an emulator or decompiler can load
Are the strings I see in a decompiled app the real ones or did the developer obfuscate them?
includes a decrypt-strings utility to recover string values an app has scrambled, rather than leaving analysts to trust what shows up in the raw disassembly
Can I inspect a dex file's structure directly instead of trusting a decompiled approximation?
exposes a reader/writer API modeled on a familiar low-level bytecode library, so a script can walk the actual dex structure rather than relying only on the jar conversion output
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for dex2jar, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail dex2jar puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in pxb1988/dex2jar, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close < 1 day first maintainer reply 15 hours
- Open backlog 375 of 593 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 375
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 13,139
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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