And you know for existing apps/clones, they would give some timeline to allow developers to volunteerly un-publish them as they do every time.
This is something that Apple forced in her AppStore a long ago. This will eventually come to Google Play as Google strictness its policies from time to time. Obfuscation is something easily reservable from an experienced dev, so you do not do it to hide your code from Google to see if is similar from others apps’ code you may have. You do it for protecting your code from the public mass eyes…
Exactly… I’d say obfuscation is needed only in the case the code itself is so unique and great it deserves protection. In most cases, code is worth nothing since there are so few unique app concepts out here… And resources / assets can always be stolen anyway (Google need to work on that).
Also, put yourself in the position of the thief, what a nightmare to understand the code and logic of an app with no context and just the thousands of lines of code. A horribly tedious process. Better do it yourself.
Hello @Mac. I would not agree with that I would say. Some times maybe the whole code/app idea is not that important. However you may have some snippets of some custom widgets of code you developed and share among your apps which might be very important not to bee taken by others even if the whole code is not that unique.
You’re right, I was exaggerating a bit 
My main point was that in most cases, trying to steal the code of an app will take longer than coding his-self, unless the initial coder has thoroughly documented his code and prepared everything in advance 
But I agree there can be cases where a skilled coder can understand the code of another guy, separate parts that can be reusable and take benefit from it.
Well it seems from the results of the poll that only 1 out of 2 of devs in our forum obfuscate their code! I would suggest that maybe some time we create some sort of seminars within the forum for android coding good practises and techniques to share knowledge.
You should always obfuscate your code. It’s damn easy and automatic with Eclipse. Just uncomment the line below this in your project.properties file
To enable ProGuard to shrink and obfuscate your code, uncomment this (available properties: sdk.dir, user.home):
proguard.config=${sdk.dir}/tools/proguard/proguard-android-optimize.txt:proguard-project.txt
Obfuscation is done automatically when you export the Android project from Eclipse. If you integrate any additional SDKs (Ads, Facebook etc.) don’t forget to include their specific settings (usually found on their forums / support sites) in your proguard-project.txt file.
Proguard will not help you much from experience decoder/cracker.
It just change class and some method name, and smaller apk file.
Also you will hard to find bug (report in Play Store).
If you are a big dev (earn much money 
) you can buy Dexguard with 480 €
When you have a bug you can always reverse obfuscation easily to get the real name of your functions back. You just have to keep the mapping file of your obfuscation so this is not a major concern. The major issue is that some times you meet strange behaviours while using proguard. I remember one time an exception driving me crazy which was a result of optimisation passes. I found the solution accidentally when decreasing passes from 5 to 3 which was ridiculous.
I’ve translated error reports with the retrace tool before, but it only gives method names not the line number of the exception. I tried adding -keeplinenumbers to my config file but it still didn’t work. Do you know how to get the error reports to keep line numbers?
Actually I also didn’t have any luck with keeping line numbers. However I almost always manage to read the retraced file based on naming tactics followed while coding. However yes you are right it is quite difficult to track the exact point of something went wrong especially on large code parts.
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Thanks.