A HEX editor may sound insanely geeky and technical, but it’s really not that bad. There is a freeware program called XVI32, which you don’t even have to install to use.
You can just download it and run the EXE file! Here’s what the main interface looks like once you open apk file.
Hex Editor
On the left side is the hex viewer, and the right side is the data inspector, which basically converts the hex values into actual data values. It’s pretty much impossible to understand anything on the hex side, so don’t even worry about it.
Most of the data on the data side will also not make sense, but there will usually be a few key pieces of text that will tell you what kind of file you are working with. In my first example, I opened a Word document in which I have removed the .docx extension. Here’s what it looked like in XVI32:
| Ranking | Name | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | PCBWay Team | 5 |
| 2 | Mason Goebel | 1 |
| 3 | Engineer | 1 |
