How to Shrink, Obfuscate and Optimize Android APK

Introduction

In this tip we will learn how to Shrink, Obfuscate and Optimize your app. To make your app as small as possible, you should enable shrinking in your release build to remove unused code and resources. When enabling shrinking, you also benefit from obfuscation, which shortens the names of your app’s classes and members, and optimization, which applies more aggressive strategies to further reduce the size of your app. Also allows you to make it difficult for hackers to modify/crack your apk.

Implementation

We will enable Obfuscation, Shrinking and Optimization during release build.

At app level build.gradle file set minifyEnabled to true and shrinkResources to true.

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 28
    buildToolsVersion "29.0.3"
    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.programtown.example"
        minSdkVersion 17
        targetSdkVersion 28
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
        testInstrumentationRunner "androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner"
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            // Enables code shrinking, obfuscation, and optimization for only
            // your project's release build type.
            minifyEnabled true

            // Enables resource shrinking, which is performed by the
            // Android Gradle plugin.
            shrinkResources true
            
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.0.2'
    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:1.1.3'
    testImplementation 'junit:junit:4.12'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.0'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.1.1'

}

References

https://developer.android.com/studio/build/shrink-code