There are some APKs on Google Play that are packed by so called packers to obfuscate their bytecode and make more difficult them to reverse engineer. I’ve made a quick study of the countermeasures and found several articles of researchers that are trying to recover DEX code of the packed program.

My question is more simplier (I hope). I don’t need to recover code and reverse its logic: all I need is to know what kind of data the program exchanges with external servers. To do it, I need to patch APK with some kind of tool like apk-mitm and then tools like mitmproxy or burp can be used. But apparently there is some kind of protection – after patching program doesn’t even start. Are there any researches that a targeted to fool this protection without recovering the DEX code of a program? Or maybe any ideas of how this protection works?

The packer in question is Ijiami if that matters.