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Extracting and examining the LibrariesWest android app

27 July, 2024

I use my local library a lot, and use the LibrariesWest app and website to do my browsing and make reservations. While website is "ok", the app is a travesty, and has been for years (my app review in 2016 started with "Works, after a fashion, but incredibly slow and unintuitive."). Both are provided by Solus UK.

A new release of the app came out a few months ago - if anything the app is now slower and clunkier than ever before. Every review of the app since its update has been 1 star out of 5.

It is a Cordova app using Framework7 (which I'd never heard of before.).

How do I know this? Well, I used ML Manager to extract the application file (APK) from my phone, unzipped it (an APK is just a zip file) and took a look!

In the assets/www folder we find an index.html file which contains the app, this tells us about the Cordova use and it loads two minified Javascript files: /src/app1.min.js and src/framework7.bundle.min.js

Running app1.min.js through https://www.unminify2.com/ gives us a prettier version we can read, and now we can see how some parts of the app work.

Next step: work out how authentication is done!

See other posts tagged with android libraries cordova javascript disappointment and all posts made in July 2024.