Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Safely Download Android Apps on The PC

It can be a real hassle to get the actual app or ".apk" file from your phone to your PC without a direct download link. So in a series of simple tutorials we will go over some basic techniques to safely download harmful Android files to a Windows machine. For this first one we will discuss a simple trick for making a website believe you are using an Android Powered device.

Step One: download and install malzilla.  Malzilla is a text based web browser with multiple tools for spoofing  your data and pulling information out of websites quickly and easy. You can find some more info and tutorials about Malzilla from Sourceforge or just do a Google search for it.


Step Two: Change the user agent to Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91). See the pic above for more details. For different Android user agents and how to use them check out a blog post over at gtrifonov.com or for a simple tutorial check this out on developers.google.com.

That simple you can now paste a webpage or link in the URL box and the website you are hitting will return with the mobile version and any download you get will be the same as what you would get on an Android device. Unfortunately  this does not work for the Google Play Market. The next tutorial will show you a couple tricks to get files off the Google Play Market out of your phone and onto your PC. 

Stay safe out there
 -R`/4N