Abstract Android malware is a well-known challenging problem and many researchers/vendors/practitioners have tried to address this issue through application analysis techniques. In order to analyze Android applications, tools decompress {APK} files and extract relevant data from the Dalvik {EXecutable} (DEX) files. To acquire the data, investigators either use decompiled intermediate code generated by existing tools, e.g., Baksmali or Dex2jar or write their own parsers/dissemblers. Thus, they either need additional time because of decompiling the application into an intermediate representation and then parsing text files, or they reinvent the wheel by implementing their own parsers. In this article, we present Rapid Android Parser for Investigating {DEX} files (RAPID) which is an open source and easy-to-use {JAVA} library for parsing {DEX} files. {RAPID} comes with well-documented {APIs} which allow users to query data directly from the {DEX} binary files. Our experiments reveal that {RAPID} outperforms existing approaches in terms of runtime efficiency, provides better reliability (does not crash) and can support dynamic analysis by finding critical offsets. Notably, the processing time for our sample set of 22.35 GB was only 1.5 h with {RAPID} while the traditional approaches needed about 23 h (parsing and querying).