It should come as no surprise that the cleanest and most robust way to introduce your own modifications to an existing project is through modifying the original source code and recompiling. However, this is not always possible. Often times, we must begin our journey to app or ROM modification from a closed source binary, and then work from there.

Luckily, there are various tools available to make life a little easier when not working with source. One such tool comes from XDA Recognized Contributor ricky310711. As one would expect from a typical ROM kitchen, Ricky's ROM Kitchen allows you to perform various tasks to existing ROMs such as adding init.d support, busybox, root, and so on.

With this toolkit, you can also extract the ROM's constituent files, deodex, and add various tweaks. The kitchen even allows you to easily de-Knox Samsung OEM ROMs. In addition to modifying ROMs, Ricky's ROM Kitchen also allows you to modify APK and JAR files. To that end, you can quickly decompile and compile APK and JAR files, as well as classes.dex.

Although modifying and building from source is always preferable, it's not always feasible. If you've been looking for a very versatile tool to help your non-source built modifications, head over to the utility thread to get started.