How to turn off only the obfuscation in Android R8?

Question

I use Android Studio 3.3 Canary 5, Gradle 4.9, gradle plugin 3.3.0-alpha05

minifyEnabled true
useProguard false
proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'

Does't work.

Answer 1

Following this answer, I was able to solve this issue. Instead of editing the build.gradle file, I added -dontobfuscate to the proguard-rules.pro file. (You can configure a different proguard rules file for debug and release builds.) This skipped the obfuscation step and allowed me to make shrink'd debug builds with R8.

Answer 2

In your gradle.properties file, add this line

 android.enableR8=false

This worked for me.