Arsc Decompiler

Developers may use resource shrinking or obfuscation tools to mangle resource names, making the decompiled output difficult for humans to understand.

Game modders often modify resources.arsc to change: arsc decompiler

The most popular use case. After decoding, you can directly edit the XML files in the res/ directory. For instance, to change an app's name, you would open res/values/strings.xml and modify the app_name string. Then, you use Apktool to rebuild the APK with the changes using the b (build) command: Developers may use resource shrinking or obfuscation tools

Malware analysts look for:

aapt dump resources app.apk > resources.txt to change an app's name

For performance optimization, some tools support partial decompilation—only extracting specific resource types (strings only, colors only, etc.) rather than the entire table.