Android ProGuard: Most Aggressive Optimizations

Question

Android\'s official proguard documentation shows two primary optimizations:

• set minifyEnabled to true
• use proguard-androi

Answer 1

According to the comment from the optimization file, the optimizations introduce certain risks and if used, the app must be tested thoroughly. According to my experience, it is necessary to disable code/simplification/advanced, because it caused final local variables which were initialized outside a lambda being NULL inside the lambda. It was very difficult to debug and find. Therefore my optimization settings are as follows:

-optimizations !code/simplification/cast,!code/simplification/advanced,!field/*,!class/merging/*,!method/removal/parameter,!method/propagation/parameter

Note that code/simplification/arithmetic must be also disabled if you target Android 2.0 and lower (which is very unlikely). Besides that, I also had to disable method/removal/parameter and method/propagation/parameter, because these implicitly enable code/simplification/advanced (see ProGuard manual for more info).