Monday, March 24, 2014

Make copies of Android apps already installed on devices

I was curious whether it was possible to copy out from mobile phones or tablets the Android apps I installed from the Google Play store. It didn't long to figure out how to do it. There are a lot of apps that can do the job including a popular file manager app: ES File Explorer which can be used to easily select the apps and either back up the Android APK file(s) to an SD card, shared or sent out. If you have the ES File Explorer app installed on the device, simply do the following to copy out the app(s).

  1. Launch the ES File Explorer app. Touch the top left blue icon as shown below.

    A menu slides from the left.

  2. Touch App Manager.

    A grid of app icons appear.

  3. Long press one or more app icons.

    The app(s) are selected.

  4. Touch one of the commands at the bottom, e.g. Backup to copy the APK's to the SD card, Share to share out to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
  5. If Backup was selected, then the APK's will be copied out to the folder /sdcard/backup/apps/.

    The Android apps APK files are extracted out.

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