remove unused classes with proguard for Android

Question

History/Context I have a project[1] where size really matters - recently I moved stuff to a shared lib[2] and thought proguard will take care and remove the unu

Answer 1

The Eclipse/Ant/Gradle build processes in the Android SDK automatically specify your code (from bin/classes) and its libraries (from libs) with the option -injars. This means that the complete application is compacted, optimized, and obfuscated (in release builds, assuming ProGuard is enabled).

The build processes only specify the Android runtime android.jar with the option -libraryjars. It is necessary to process the code, but it should not end up in the processed apk, since it is already present on the device.

So it should all work out automatically. You may still see entire libraries with their original names in processed apks, if your configuration proguard-project.txt contains lines like -keep class org.mylibrary.** { *; }. Such configuration is typically a conservative solution to account for reflection. With some research and experimentation, you can often refine the configuration and get better results. You can figure out why classes are being kept with the option -whyareyoukeeping.