How To Change Notification Icons in individual Apps? (eg: K9, Twidroyd, etc)

You may not need to resign them if you never fully extracted the application to begin with. Meaning if you just opened it with your compressing/decompressing program then dropped the edited png into it, it should change and not alter the signed info.

I just edited K9, and didn't need to resign it using this process.
1. Pull the app
2. Using something like Winrar or 7zip to open the apk, don't decompress it and recompress it, just open it to explore the contents within 7zip (or something like it). Pull the stat_*.png file from /res/drawable/ (don't recall the name of the png) to your computer.
3. Edit that png with your image editing software
4. Once you are happy with your edited picture, throw it back into the opened Winrar program. Winrar asks if you want to edit the file, I assume others do too.
5. Push the edited file back to /data/app
6. You may need to change the permissions if they got messed up in transition.

Code:

adb shell
chmod 644 /data/app/com.fsck.k9-1.apk

Obviously things can go wrong in the process though, so resigning may indeed need to be done. Usually not though in my experience. If you are resigning how are you going about doing it?

Another alternative, is you can push the app to /system/app and it should work that way, since signatures don't matter in /system/app . Obviously /system space is at a premium with a lot of ROMs and themes, though so this isn't the ideal solution if you want to edit a lot of apps.

 

No problem. Enjoy the themeing

 

Apps in the /data partition are signed by the original creator. This signature is recorded in android in a database (I forget the file name right now). After modifying the program, the hash value of the original apk and your newly modified apk no longer match.

Ways to get around this, are to push your modified app to the /system partition where hashes and signatures are not modified (ie /system/app), or totally uninstall the original apk along with references in the database as to the signature and then manually reinstall in the /data partition. Moving the app to the /system partition is by far the easiest thing to do.

 

From what Ive done in the past I didn't reinstall the app, I just copied or moved the app from /data/app to /system/app and rebooted. I didn't reinstall.

 

Theming

When I want to theme something (I just "upgraded" the icons in my Mms.apk yesterday) I use root explorer to copy it to the sdcard, mount the sdcard in Windows/Linux/OSX and then use 7zip to open "Drop" the edited pngs I want into the app to replace the ones I have. I Have NEVER had to use a signing tool or adb push/pull to accomplish what I want and I themed out a few roms quite a bit. I change them on the PC then move them back to the SD Card (OR and update.zip format for a fresh flash) and then move/copy/paste them to /system/app. I modified Quickboot, EStrongs file explorer among other things this way.

Basically just move the file to the /system/apps folder and reboot and it'll show up as a useable application. You can STILL definately break it if you do something wrong. (I've been working on the statusbar.xml in Pandora 1.5 to no avail, all it does is NOT show up in the statusbar)

 

If you are going to do any serious editing of xml files you need to decompile the app with a tool like apkmanager since the resources.arsc file needs to be rebuilt to reflect those changes. What you want to do is a whole different ball of wax compared to simple jpeg changes.

 

if we completely uninstall and reinstall to the /data partition after making changes we should get update notifications from the market rite?

 

yes -- moving reinstalling on data will give you the ability to market update.