https://www.bradcypert.com/tags/proguard/ Recent content in Proguard on BradCypert.com Hugo en-us Sun, 23 Oct 2022 18:41:15 -0400 https://www.bradcypert.com/what-the-heck-is-androids-proguard/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bradcypert.com/what-the-heck-is-androids-proguard/ <p>Hello there Android developer or curious onlooker. Welcome back to another blog post talking about your favorite, my favorite, and <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the world’s favorite mobile operating system</a> . Today we’re going to talk about Proguard and what that means for Android Developers.</p> <p>Proguard is a free tool that has recently became pretty mainstream in the Android ecosystem. In fact, you’ve probably seen it’s name mentioned a few times in Android Studio (provided you’re using Android Studio), but what does it do? Proguard helps developers by shrinking, optimizing, obfuscating, and preverifying your Java class files. It’ll take care of some helpful tidbits like removing unused classes, methods, fields and attributes as well as unused instructions (Dead Code). Additionally, it takes care of optimizing your bytecode for you and renaming your classes, fields, and methods to extremely short and meaningless names. The two main purposes of Proguard are to make your Android application more performant and make it more difficult to reverse engineer.</p>