Android: Remove unused resources when releasing

Issue

I've seen that's possible to detect unused resources (especially media resources which take some space) here android-remove-unused-resources-before-shipping and here remove-all-unused-resources-from-an-android-project.

I was wondering if we can use these tools in a ant build file in order to ignore them when building a release package?

I'm using eclipse with the latest version of ADT and ant to build.

Thank you :)

Solution

To remove unused resources you can use Android Lint tool from ADT 16. It will help you not only to remove unused resources, but also to find potential bugs.

http://tools.android.com/tips/lint

You can also enable proguard in release mode

The ProGuard tool shrinks, optimizes, and obfuscates your code by removing unused code and renaming classes, fields, and methods with semantically obscure names. The result is a smaller sized .apk file that is more difficult to reverse engineer.

http://developer.android.com/tools/help/proguard.html

Answered By - Raghunandan