Why Proguard keeps Activity class in Android?

Question

I have applied ProGuard to my Android application.

I\'m using

android-studio/sdk/tools/proguard/proguard-android.txt

Answer 1

Because the activities are listed in the manifest and classes referenced there are automagically kept. This is needed because the Android framework accesses these app entry points via reflection.

From here:

The build process runs the tool aapt to automatically create the configuration file bin/proguard.txt, based on AndroidManifest.xml and other xml files. The build process then passes the configuration file to ProGuard. So ProGuard itself indeed doesn't consider AndroidManifest.xml, but aapt+ProGuard do.