Smali

The Icelandic theme comes up again and again in Android. The Dalvik in DVM is the name of an Icelandic fishing village where the original developer of the DVM’s ancestors came from. So, continuing with the Icelandic theme, there are also Baksmali and Smali, which are the de facto tools used to disassemble and assemble classes.dex files. Smali means shepherd or assembler in Icelandic, and Baksmali means disassembler. Disassembled files are given the .smali extension, where each Smali file corresponds to the original java file.

Note

ART replaces the DVM, and ART simply stands for Android Runtime.

Smali files are ASCII representation of the Dalvik opcodes and are fairly easy to read, similar in style and content to what we saw using dexdump ...

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