Automating My Android Pentesting Lab Setup

As a mobile application penetration tester, I constantly find myself rebuilding my testing environment — spinning up fresh VMs, setting up new machines, or just starting over after something breaks. Every time, I go through the same motions: installing tools, setting paths, configuring launchers… it adds up fast.

So I decided to automate the entire process.

This script sets up a complete Android pentesting environment on any Debian-based system (like Kali Linux or Parrot OS). It installs all the tools I typically use for both static and dynamic analysis, configures everything properly, and gets me ready to start testing without wasting time on setup.

What It Installs

Here’s everything the script sets up:

Static Analysis & Recon

• MobSF — Static/dynamic Android app analysis framework
• Quark-Engine — Flags suspicious behavior in APKs using rule-based scoring

Dynamic Analysis & Runtime Inspection

• Frida — Dynamic instrumentation toolkit
• Frida-Tools — CLI wrappers for managing Frida sessions
• Objection — Frida-based runtime mobile app exploration
• Drozer — Maps attack surface and helps exploit known Android weaknesses

Reverse Engineering

• JADX — Decompiles .dex files to readable Java source
• APKTool — Disassembles/rebuilds APKs and smali code
• Bytecode Viewer — GUI for inspecting Java bytecode
• Ghidra — Full-featured reverse engineering suite (NSA-built)

APK Editing & Payload Crafting

• Evil-Droid — Injects Metasploit payloads into APKs
• APK Editor Studio — GUI APK editor
• Super-Sign — Bypasses signature checks for modified APKs

Core Android Tooling

• Android Platform Tools (ADB/Fastboot)
• ADB (Android Debug Bridge)

Dependencies & System Packages

• Git
• Curl
• Docker (for MobSF)
• Java Runtime (default-jre + openjdk)
• Python 3.11
• Pipx (for Python CLI apps)
• Libpcap-dev
• Unzip

Everything installs cleanly and configures itself so you can jump right into testing.

You can grab it on GitHub here: https://github.com/Bayani-cipher/android-tools-installer

It’s open, simple, and made to save time. Feel free to fork it, modify it, or use it as-is in your workflow.

If you rebuild your pentesting environment as often as I do, this should make things a whole lot easier.

Happy Hunting!