Relevance of code minification in a performance world
summary
Benchmarks show turning on R8 and code minification yields concrete wins: a test app shrinks ~45% and reduces screen load time ~39%, with dex load dropping from ~2.9s to ~0.07s when fewer dex files remain (single-dex 65,000-reference limit). Wildcard keep rules (for example keeping R classes) can bloat dexes and hurt startup — one innocuous rule raised size ~3% and increased startup ~34%. Use android-optimized.txt, full mode, printconfiguration and add-configuration-debugging, map keep rules to source and test minified builds in CI.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:17Life of code
- 2:23Obfuscation
- 3:40Minification
- 6:20Android Toolchain
- 10:21Test bed project
- 11:14Comparison
- 12:49Code Inlining
- 15:37App Startup
- 19:07Rules can hurt you
- 19:37Case Study
- 20:07Transitive R classes
- 27:11Imported Rules
- 27:53Further Optimisations
- 29:30Debugging Rules
- 30:23Proguard Playground
- 32:05Further Reading
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