Amazon advises Android developers on how to protect code

Amazon Appstore for Android developers should consider obfuscating their code if they are concerned about their applications being reverse engineered, the company said yesterday.

Obfuscating the code modifies the source and machine code to be difficult for a human to understand if the app gets decompiled, according to Amazon.

For Android apps, Proguard is a code obfuscation tool that is provided to developers once they download the SDK (software development kit). The program shrinks, optimises, and obfuscates the source code, Amazon said. Besides obfuscating the code, Proguard also reduces file sizes and boosts the run-time performance of the code.