SmartSwitch Explorer

Desktop app for decrypting Samsung SmartSwitch backups and extracting their contents.

Windows (.exe) · Mac OS (.dmg)
Linux (x64 AppImage) · Linux (x64 legacy AppImage) · Linux (aarch64 AppImage) · Other Downloads

The x64 legacy AppImage targets Ubuntu 22.04 (GLIBC 2.35). Release builds check the bundled ELF dependency requirements and smoke-test the packaged AppImage on Ubuntu 22.04. GLIBC 2.35 is a minimum, not a guarantee for every distribution: system graphics, font, and desktop libraries are still required. The locked ARM64 Qt dependency targets GLIBC 2.39, so a legacy ARM64 build is not available.

AppImage builds use SHA-256-verified appimagetool 1.9.1 and type2-runtime 20251108 downloads in a private temporary directory. Both architectures' version pins and digests live in scripts/release/build_appimage.sh; update them together when upgrading these tools.

SmartSwitch Explorer is a desktop app for finding encrypted Samsung Smart Switch backups and exporting decrypted contents:

• Messages (CSV or JSON)
• Applications (extracted data + APKs)
• Photos and videos
• Contacts
• Call log
• Galaxy Watch backups
• Storage, settings, and other backup categories

How to use

1. Launch the app.
2. Pick a folder that contains backups, or a parent folder like a mounted home directory, Documents, or Samsung. Alternatively, click Open File Directly to select one or more Smart Switch files; cancelling leaves the current selection unchanged.
3. Select a detected backup.
4. Choose what to export.
5. Set the destination folder and click Export Selected.

Refresh rescans remembered folders and automatically detected backup locations. When no locations are available, it immediately shows No backups detected.

Linux AppImage permissions

Browsers and GitHub downloads do not preserve the executable permission on an AppImage. After verifying that the file came from the project release, make it executable for your user and launch it:

chmod 700 ~/Downloads/smartswitch-explorer-linux-x86_64.AppImage
~/Downloads/smartswitch-explorer-linux-x86_64.AppImage

Mode 700 is appropriate for a personal download. Use 755 only when other local users should also be able to read and run the application. A newly downloaded file having mode 644 or 664 is expected and safer than making all downloads executable automatically.

Running from source

uv sync
uv run smartswitch-explorer

Nix:

nix run github:sachk/smartswitch-explorer

Release workflow

CI and release actions are pinned to reviewed commits. Build jobs use read-only repository permissions and do not retain checkout credentials; only the tag-triggered publishing job can write release assets. Artifact uploads fail when no files are found. The publisher downloads artifacts from its own workflow run with GitHub CLI and uploads files from the per-artifact directories.

Additional format docs:

• docs/calllog_format.md
• docs/encrypted_formats.md