I know you're not really into obfuscation, but I really need to react to this:
From here, I don't want to obfuscate
our code as I have seen it broken
before. I want something a little more solid, and I also want to learn how to do this properly.
ProGuard is very reliable in my experience, and this although I use a couple of advanced features such as AIDL and some native code which calls Java method.. It takes a little work to read the documentation and do things properly, but once you're there ProGuard is extremely reliable and also optimizes your app.
Custom security/cryptographic tricks are good, but without obfuscation it's like throwing a stone in the water in my humble opinion.
I've used ProGuard in production for many months, and it just works flawlessly.
If you're into learning, then read the ProGuard manual carefully, experiment with it, and inspect its output logs.
