How Proguard Works

Some Android devs treat ProGuard like a scary black box that breaks their app in inscrutable ways, and must be tamed with lots of -keep statements. Others give up and turn it off entirely. In this talk, I show how ProGuard is analyzing, and transforming your app. I show how it fits into the build process, how to successfully configure it, and how to use its outputs. I end with a preview of the changes coming with R8, which is planned to replace ProGuard in the Android build process.