Yeah I've had good success with patching apps. If the app complains the phone is an emulator, just patch the byte code that is checking for emulators too :)
Unfortunately I could not patch any apps yet. They open with a blank screen and crash after a few seconds. objection can't connect to the server. My phone doesn't seem to be easily rootable, so I'm kinda stuck for a while.
apkpure.com has a track record of serving malicious APKs.
If you run it in a sandbox environment it's probably okay-ish, but if you already have the app installed from a trusted source on your phone, you can grab the APK file with `adb pull`.
You can add a self-signed trusted root ca, and set a system proxy in Android and apps will (usually) use that, although the Google and other big-tech apps will certificate pin and/or use HSTS, so they won't trust your cert. Also newer versions of Android make it a huge PITA.