How to use @Nullable and @Nonnull annotations more effectively?

Question

I can see that @Nullable and @Nonnull annotations could be helpful in preventing NullPointerExceptions but they do not propag

Answer 1

What I do in my projects is to activate the following option in the "Constant conditions & exceptions" code inspection:
Suggest @Nullable annotation for methods that may possibly return null and report nullable values passed to non-annotated parameters

When activated, all non-annotated parameters will be treated as non-null and thus you will also see a warning on your indirect call:

clazz.indirectPathToA(null); 

For even stronger checks the Checker Framework may be a good choice (see this nice tutorial.
Note: I have not used that yet and there may be problems with the Jack compiler: see this bugreport