What is Proguard?

Generally, we see lots of terms, keywords, or files but due to some timing issue, we don’t feel it important to go through that and figure out its usage and importance.

Android Proguard is also among those and as it plays a really important role while building .apk, So it's time to get known to Android Proguard.

Android Proguard is a free java class file shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator.

Components of Proguard

    1.    Shrinker: It detects and removes unused classes, files, methods, and attributes.

    2.    Optimizer: It analyzes and optimizes the bytecode of the methods.

    3.    Obfuscator: It renames the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. It is mainly used to prevent the reverse engineering of Android Applications.

Benefits of Proguard

As we all got to know about Proguard till now, we should also know about its main benefits and why we use it mainly.

As Proguard shrinks, optimizes, and obfuscates the classes, fields, and attributes, it results in a smaller size and efficient .apk file that is difficult to reverse engineer.

Happy Learning Geeks!