With this month marking the one-year announcement of our ProGuard keep rule visualizer tool, ProGuard Playground, we figured it was a good opportunity to reflect on how it’s evolved. If you haven’t used or heard of ProGuard Playground it’s a free tool compatible with both ProGuard and R8 that helps you visualize your keep rules interactively.
Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? When Playground was launched in its beta phase last year you were able to adjust keep rules without rebuilding your app, share those rules, and embed user-created playgrounds into blogs. As some of our customers have told us, “it’s been a great time-saver”
Since February 2021 there has been…
- 3,134 Playgrounds created
- 21,008 configurations evaluated
- 2,120 APKs
- 53 forks
- 2,077 uploads
We also presented ProGuard Playground at Droidcon, demonstrating how it can help developers write keep rules for Kotlin apps.
Our next major update was advancing Playground out of beta with three substantial additions:
- Named Playgrounds which make it easier than ever to track and share your Playgrounds.
- Seamlessly integrating our mobile app testing resource, AppSweep
- Merging our open-source Kotlin Metadata Printer into ProGuard Playground
AppSweep Integration
Since the October release, over 160 Playgrounds have been scanned by Appsweep!
One of which was fueled by our commitment to securing applications more seamlessly, integrating our mobile app testing resource, AppSweep. Integrating these two free tools made it possible to modify keep rules easily while checking potential vulnerabilities within the code.
Kotlin Metadata Printer Integration
Our team also merged our Kotlin Metadata Printer into ProGuard Playground, enabling developers to detect what metadata is within their app. This shows developers what secrets could be hidden in their app even if Java obfuscation has been applied.
Have you created any Playgrounds yet? Give it a try and let us know! Any feedback is appreciated as we continue to improve our tools to help developers.