Jetpack Compose is the coolest kid on the block, but it has various different drawbacks that I at least notice when we did the migration of the app I was working on. And I wanted to share them in my blog with everyone, just in case you need to do the same thing in your app.
Continue reading “Observations of migrating an app from XML to Jetpack Compose”Tag: R8
How to tackle the R8 optimisation nightmare in a sane way?
Implementing R8 optimizations can always be a nightmare for the dev that has to do it. R8 is a compiler that works together with ProGuard to shrink, minify, and obfuscate your code. It can reduce significantly the APK size by removing classes that are not used at all. It checks the hierarchy of classes and once it sees a class is not being attached to anything, it removes it.
The above, of course, is a double-edged sword as in some cases, it can remove classes that you actually need like request/response classes and many others. But in a recent project, we got like 10 megabytes of reduced APK size (down from 30) which is a huge gain.
The problem comes when you want to tell R8 to keep certain classes that you need either deobfuscated or simply kept within your dex archive. So let’s see what the approach could be in such cases.
Continue reading “How to tackle the R8 optimisation nightmare in a sane way?”
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