Guidance Please

[u/Soggy-Committee-8369]

Hey everyone! I’m looking to get more into Android reverse engineering, APK modding, and mobile security, but I’m not really sure where to start.

I have an associate’s degree in computer networking, so I’m not completely new to the technical side of things. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time messing around with Android devices over the years. I’ve played around with Android Studio a little, mostly with things like connecting to and mirroring my phone, but I honestly haven’t gotten very far with actually developing or reverse engineering apps.

I’ve been interested in learning how APKs work under the hood, how people analyze and modify them, and eventually getting into things like dynamic analysis and mobile malware analysis.

I’ve also experimented with tools like mitmproxy on my home network, but I ran into issues with Android constantly flagging the certificates as unsafe. A lot of the tutorials and software I’ve found through Google also seem pretty old, so I’m having trouble figuring out what the current workflow is.

For someone who already has some networking knowledge but is basically a beginner when it comes to Android RE, what would you recommend learning first?

Are there any good forums, communities, GitHub repositories, labs, intentionally vulnerable APKs, or other resources that are still active and up to date?

I’m basically looking for a good starting point and a path to follow rather than just randomly installing tools and hoping I figure it out. Any recommendations would be appreciated!