The security of your device is one important thing that you cannot miss out on. Especially when it comes to companies and businesses; their applications include crucial data that should not get compromised. Using Proguard could be really helpful in such a case. It is an open-source command-line tool that detects and even removes unused classes, fields, even methods, and attributes. It aids in creating a production-ready application in the realm of Android Platform.
The point is in the present time, security has become critical to almost every aspect of your life. The same thing applies to the code that you do write for your applications. Any APK file in the Play store can get DE obfuscated. Here it is being said about reverse engineering of the APK file. What you do during your development is that you do put your efforts into converting your overall concept or ideas into code and then package them to an APK type of file to deploy.
But you know what, what really hackers or attackers do is simply pick your APK file, download it from any sort of third-party site, and even DE obfuscate the APK file to produce the source code files or even resources that you do develop. It is usually not a good idea to go live without even securing your codebase. It is critical that you take up time and fix this code security issue if you haven’t done this thing yet.
Remember that an APK file in the absence of security is like an ATM card in the absence of a pin: Anyone can access it or even use it for their own purpose. You may be creating your competitors here. Take a quick look at the Play store and see how many duplicate apps are there. make sure that you are careful about code theft.
What is this tool?
The name of this tool itself suggests that it works as a guard to your overall app’s codebase. This tool is a tool in Android that gets used to shrink, obfuscate, and even optimize your overall app. This works like:
- Obfuscation is something that renames your overall classes and their members to some sort of random short forms, that just results in reduced DEX file sizes. even and the decompiled code is going to simply be hard to read and even understand.
- Optimization is something that analysis and optimizes the code.
- Shrinking is something that just eradicates the unused areas from being a part of the final type of APK. It is generally done in two phases:
- Code shrinking that detects and safely removes unused variables, methods, even classes, etc., from your app’s and its library dependencies
- Resource shrinking is something that removes unused resource files from your app’s and its library dependences
Why do you need this tool?
Well, it is important to protect your app’s codebase from code theft with minimal configurations, you can use this tool. It is going to make things hard to understand and re-use after proper decompiling an APK file that has ProGuard applied. Once ProGuard is applied, variable, method, and even class names will be replaced by some or the other meaningless names or characters that will be hard to read and understand. This way you can simply can protect yourself to some extent.
Along with overall obfuscation, it even offers the benefits of reduction in APK file size, optimizations, even more. making use of this tool will yield smaller size APK files that are somewhat challenging for reverse engineering. Also, you don’t really need to spend the time to eradicate unused things from code and even resources.
Things you should Remember
- Improper type of usage of ProGuard may lead to unwanted or even unexpected results, like crashes that will have a huge impact.
- Even though this tool is applied, some parts of code or resources might even be reachable to hackers, so, you make sure that you use the tool in the most comprehensive way. If the need be, you can take assistance of professionals.
- Always use keep rules for third-party type of libraries and model classes
It should be absolutely clear why Proguard tools are needed now that you have a proper understanding of what they are actually and what they are used for. you do utilise Proguard technologies to prevent this from happening since Android applications are somewhat easy to reverse engineer. Other reasons are self-evident to you, like-
- It enhances the application’s performance and saves memory by deleting unneeded code.
- It helps in the reduction of the code complexity of overall Android applications.
- It boosts the overall performance of the programme by optimising the overall functions of the application code.
Reasons of using such a tool are quite manifold and a few of them are as under:
- One of the most critical benefits is that it optimises the code, making it efficient and more dependable.
- It simply improves the code format and rearranges it by just deleting unnecessary code segments.
- This even aids in resource reduction by diminishing unnecessary resources.
- It aids in the development of apps with the proper least feasible apk size
- It enhances the efficiency of the application’s code. of course, once there is better efficiency, the results are going to be quicker.
The point is no matter in which industry you are in, if you have your business apps, make sure that they are guarded against any sort of attack or danger. You cannot simply take a risk with the security of your application. What is the point if your business app leaks a huge data that is confidential? Such a thing would not just put you in real trouble but also ensure that you lose your brand name and reputation. When you have accumulated so much of data on your applications, you cannot simply take their security lightly.
Conclusion
To sum up, get the Proguard android option today and ensure that you have a secure application working. These are the tools that can add up better security, efficiency and effectivity in all sort of operations and tasks.
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