Recovering a Deleted Flutter Project Source Code

I generally tend to keep all my projects on VCS, also hard drive failure is something that i wasn't expecting, my seagate firecuda compute 1tb sshd just gave up on me and it just doesn't work anymore, not even recognised anymore, it just died ! i think the cause would be thrashing ? because i was running ubuntu on it.

So anyways, i lost all my data, my projects, courses, movies, wallpapers, photos, phone backups, local github repositories, everything ! all the data is gone !

I can download most of the stuff again, but my projects ? what do i do about that ? recently been working a lot on a flutter project, and i lost all of its source code.

Luckily i debug my flutter apps on my android phone, so i have the app installed on my device, this blog will describe the process of obtaining the source code from an installed app on my phone. Let's get started !

Extracting the apk

open up power shell and make sure your device is connected in adb mode

adb devices

now lets find out the package name of our installed app

adb shell pm list packages | sort

and there was my app !

now get the path to the apk for this and copy it to pc

adb shell pm path com.example.automovapp

adb pull /data/app/com.example.automovapp-ZYDLTRSmeZ3ZOXhmatfjXA==/base.apk

Now simply extract the apk !

This will be its contents

Extracting source code

But where is the source code in this ?

its in base\assets\flutter_assets\kernel_blob.bin !

Flutter, in debug mode, keeps the source code (with comments!) in the file kernel_blob.bin. Awesome !

Now simply extract the strings from the file

You can open the file in notepad, but some stuff might be ugly, so we need to extract only the strings, Here i am using my Ubuntu WSL to extract strings from this .bin file.

In Ubuntu WSL

strings kernel_blob.bin > extracted_code.dart

open extracted_code.dart

Voilà ! there's our source code

NOTE: you can do a simple search for your package name to get only our package files.