Can I generate an unsigned APK using dexguard? - android-studio

My question is quite simple but it seems I cannot find the answer on the web and since dexGuard does not have a trial period I cannot test it myself.
Can I generate an unsigend apk obfuscated/encrypted with dexguard in Android Studio. I've been told that is not possible because the signature is used during the obfuscation/encryption process but I feel like I'm missing something.
I would like to know if I can obtain the same result I obtain with "assemble release" gradle task with proguard enabled but using dexguard instead for a better protection.
Thank you for your help

Dexguard is a better version than Proguard so it has all the functionalities that has its little brother. From the Dexguard docs:
The procedure for building Android applications and libraries remains
the same. You can invoke gradle with the usual targets, such as
assemble, build, install, and connectedInstrumentTest. For instance,
to build the release version of your application and install it on a
connected device:
gradle installRelease
To build the release version of a library:
gradle assembleRelease
Debug builds use debug settings, without
optimization or obfuscation. Release builds use release settings, with
full optimization and obfuscation. Applications can optionally be
signed. The entries in application archives are always zip-aligned for
efficiency.
Additionally you can use the Standalone version which makes DexGuard run from the command line. By using this you can post-process an existing Android application (.apk file).
I only use Dexguard to obfuscate a Library in Standalone mode but I am pretty sure it will work.

Related

What does the Android Studio delegateBuildRunToGradle do?

I'm trying to resolve some dependency issues when using an externally installed Gradle, rather than the one that come with Android Studio (AS). I then came across the particular AS setting under
File > Settings > Build,Execution,Deployment > Build Tools > Gradle > Runner.
[x] Delegate IDE build/run actions to Gradle
This is apparently also available as the Gradle config delegateBuildRunToGradle. But I can't find any sane explanation as to what it does. I thought all AS builds used Gradle...
While the Gradle doc page say it's on by default. This was not the case for my AS 3.2.2.
What does this option do?
(When should it be used?)
I was hoping to have a more precise answer, but since nothing has come forward here, I guess the only answer is that (what is written in the screenshot above) the IntelliJ IDEA has it's own way to make the builds. For many practical purposes it is probably better to have a more updated and working Gradle installation and enable the above option, to let it do its job.

Android Studio: Where are Gradle build tasks defined?

I am trying to learn about how a gradle build works. When I do a build, I see a bunch of tasks executed, e.g.:
app:assembleDebug
app:preBuild
app:packageDebug
I would like to see exactly what these tasks are doing. I assume these are Gradle / Groovy scripts. I tried unzipping all the jars under Android Studio. Lots of stuff there, but I don't see anything relevant (I may have missed something in the voluminous listing). Are these tasks hidden within a class file? Am I looking in the wrong place?
All these tasks are created by the Gradle Android plugin, either the library version (com.android.library) or the application version (com.android.application). You can find the source code of these plugins in this repository.
However, it may be difficult to get insight on each task as some of them may be implemented by custom task types of the Android plugin, others may only be regular configured Gradle tasks. Also, the configuration of the tasks may be spreaded across multiple files, as many of them may be created dynamically.
But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary to know the exact functionality of each task, instead you should focus on the basic concepts of Android development and the Gradle plugin, e.g. build types and variants. The Android plugin provides a specific DSL and depending on the specified configuration, it will create the tasks automatically.

Building Boost with VS2015

I am trying to update from VS2013->VS2015, and to do that I need to rebuild my boost library files using VS2015. I grabbed the latest boost (1.58). By default boost is trying to build with VS2013. I tried to invoke bjam with toolset=msvc-14.0 but this did not work, as it keeps saying:
'cl' is not a recognized as an internal or external command
I guess it doesn't know where VS2015 is located? Does anyone know what I need to change to get boost to build with VS2015?
BlueGo is a tool which builds Boost using Visual Studio 2010/12/13/15. You just have to start the application, select your configuration and hit the Build button- everything else works automatically. The application downloads the library, extracts it and builds it. Can be downloaded from here.
Screenshot of BlueGo:
You also need to install Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015 as described here.
Prebuild boost libraries for VS2015 can be found here. Those seem to be very carefully maintained.

Converting android ndk build files to gradle

Is there any documentation on converting a application.mk/android.mk file to a gradle based build.gradle file?
good links, QArea. Thanks a lot!
At this moment NDK support in Gradle are very limited. If you need to assemble something that gradle not provides that function
I do like this.
I collect the old-fashioned, but to .so-patches automatically picks up the Gradle-plugin:
ndk-build -j4 NDK_LIBS_OUT=src/main/jniLibs
Otherwise, you must wait for next version of gradle 0.13. Devs promise that NDK will fix integration with NDK.
I made a script tool to convert android.mk building system to gradle building system, because I wanted to test the demo source codes in:
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/development/+/05523fb0b48280a5364908b00768ec71edb847a2/samples
But after searching whole internet, I found no one did it yet. So I created this tool by myself. But even with this tool, we couldn't ensure all projects in AndroidSamples could be built and executed successfully because of the API versions and features mismatch. So I created my own projects for https://android.googlesource.com/platform/development/+/05523fb0b48280a5364908b00768ec71edb847a2/samples
And I want to convert those demo projects one by one.
Now the whole source codes are here:
https://github.com/clockzhong/AndroidSamples
I already successfully converted some samples into gradle building system and executed them correctly on my android phones. But I still have some version mismatch issues, anyway, I'll mentioned it in the project check-in comments.

generate exe file

i have developed application in visual c++ 6.0,i have do exe of that application,i have done by using icnt.exe(install creator),but when i run my application exe file on other system which does't have the vc++ software it's showing dll files are missing,how could than i downloaded the dll files again it is asking other dll's files.i want run my application without installing vc++ software in windows,how can i solve it,plz help me i'm touble.
How to make Realease build? by default its debug build
thanks for reply.
As a wild guess, you have deployed the Debug build, which depends on DLLs that are not allowed to be shipped.
If that is the case, have VC6 create a Release build and deploy that.
You can verify which DLLs are required by your application with the depends.exe utility that came with Visual Studio.
Edit: The easiest way to get a release build when ready is to use the Batch Build command from the Build menu. It will let you pick among all of the known build types in the project, and choose to either build them clean (recommended) or to just bring them up to date.
It is also possible to switch the GUI to default to the Release build instead of Debug. That is the right thing to do if you actually need to run the debugger on the Release build. Note that both builds include debug symbols. The differences have more to do with which runtime libraries are linked, and certain optimizations such as making the assert() macro have no effect.

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