Leandro Martin PeraltaAug 12, 2025
@ianlake, I wanted to share with you that 3 of the dependencies on the Android project I am working on introduced issues wit R8/proguard in their latest builds: Google Places, SQLDelight and MSAL. It is frustrating you find out only when trying to put together a production build to upload to Google Play. Are there any efforts being made to help library and/or app developers catch this issues earlier?
Show threadIan LakeAug 13, 2025

@Argenkiwi - first of all, you should really consider generating baseline profiles regularly, which already requires a release build. You're leaving behind 30% better performance!

Uploading to Google Play should not be the first time you are putting together a release build.
https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/baselineprofiles/overview

Baseline Profiles overview  |  App quality  |  Android Developers

Android Developers
Show threadIan Lake
@Argenkiwi - that being said, I don't think SQLDelight does any reflection at all that would be affected by ProGuard and both Google Places and MSAL have a ProGuard file already included in their AARs that packages the correct rules, so it feels like all of those libraries are already doing the correct thing?
Aug 13, 2025 at 2:45amWeb
Show threadIan LakeAug 13, 2025
@Argenkiwi - but I totally understand that writing the _right_ ProGuard rules can be tricky - there's actually a project in works right now that tries to make that way easier by generating them from annotations attached to the actual methods/classes doing reflection that would be affected by ProGuard: https://cs.android.com/androidx/platform/frameworks/support/+/androidx-main:annotation/annotation-keep/
Show threadLeandro Martin PeraltaAug 13, 2025
@ianlake That looks interesting. Pro guard rules is not something I usually need to write for my projects, and writing them to compensate for them being missing from a third party library is hard to figure out and then maintain. I'm not sure how many I accumulated overtime and now I'm hesitant to remove because I'm not sure they are needed or not.
Show threadIan LakeAug 13, 2025
@Argenkiwi - I suspect this will be more helpful for library developers since they're the ones struggling with writing the right ProGuard rules for the code they own.
Show threadLeandro Martin PeraltaAug 13, 2025
@ianlake I have found an issue in SQL delight's tracker acknowledging the issue, and it has happened in other occasions with different libraries. In the case of MSAL, they released a patch 7.0.1 that solved some of it, but introduced new R8 issues. My point is that this happens in projects from respectable organizations and I am wondering if there is something missing.