Someone mentioned that APK Downgrade Extraction no longer works on Android 14, and regardless of the mobile forensic tool used, it is impossible to successfully extract data via APK Downgrade Extraction.
I'm curious about this issue and decide to find out what's going on. Take WhatsApp for testing, and I manually run the script step by step to conduct APK Downgrade Extraction on smartphone running Android 14. First of all, keep present version of the APK and rename it to "whatsapp.apk" instead of "base.apk".
Next, uninstall WhatsApp with "-k" parameter so as to keep the data safe and sound. Then restart the phone in order to install the old version of the APK. The purpose was to utilize the allowBackup attribute to perform an ADB backup.
However, an error message appear during installation, indicating that Android 14 does not allow installation due to the target SDK version being too low. It seemed impossible to proceed.
Fortunately, there is a way to bypass this restriction by using certain parameter " --bypass-low-target-sdk-block " to successfully install the APK. After that, I'm able to perform the backup and retrieve the chat messages of WhatsApp.
Finally, the original version of the APK needed to be installed to restore everything to its original state.
