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Baptiste Robert

I found this code in the WhatsApp source code. I don't understand the purpose of this code 🧐🤔

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My guess is ProGuard (Android's default minifier + obfuscator) added random lines of code to make reverse engineering difficult. I know DexGuard does this for sure.

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ProGuard doesn't do any obfuscation beyond optimizing and minifying the code. When they explicitly refer to obfuscation, they mean renaming classes, fields and methods to minimal names. You still do that for open source code as part of optimizing and it just strips those names.

3:58 PM · Apr 20, 2020Twitter Web App

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Ah, thanks for the clarification! I could've sworn I've read ProGuard adds dummy lines of code. Anyways, DexGuard does it, and I'm sure WhatsApp of all apps uses a paid tool for advanced code hardening.

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