Joe Hewitt about as open as

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Joe Hewitt, funny the complaints about open coming from a Facebook developer, the same firm troubled by privacy gaffles, not being open, etc.

Lets back track a bit. Other OSes claiming open in mobile devices. Symbian, at first Symbian source tree was not accessible and viewable by outsiders much like Android. JavaME, same deal.  You see folks, its normal in mobile operating systems and in fact in any operating system with multiple stakeholders to at some point in the incubation period for the master source tree to be not viewable to outsiders.

The claim of it does not have this or that so must not be open is a bit of FUD to distract us from discussing other issues such as the consumer should have a choice in OSes, mobile operator device/service plans, etc without shackles of any OEM or Mobile Operator and Apple’s policy of locking down the consumer is somewhat wrong and miss-guided.

 

 

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Obfuscating from Eclipse

WARNING this is not for the faint-of-heart! It will break upon SDK revisions! Because it might result in more work for  GoogleOHA Engineers they might discourage it! WARNING, THIS ONLY WORKS WITH ECLIPSE! If you look at the SetUP Ant task code you will find that it checks for an sdk.ant.build.revision number with a max value of 3 set at this time. The value is stored in the sdk.properties file at the root of the platform version folder.

Now, here is the trick. Change the number to the max which is 3. DO NOT STOP YET AS YOU ARE NOT DONE. Copy the complete set of ant_rules_r2.xml, ant_libs_rules_r2.xml, etc and change the copy names to use r3.  Add the new obfuscate target making sure to add the other stuff such as Proguard config checking, etc. Now change that dex target by setting depends to include the obfuscate target you added after the compile target in that depends line.

Now, fire up Eclipse and compile all you want knowing that its being obfuscated automatically. Neat huh? FINAL WARNING, I HAVE NOT TESTED THIS WITH ANDROID LIBRARY PROJECTS YET!

I found it as I was looking at ways to decrease the ANT build script code I was writing and I really did not want to re-invent what Google/OHA were already doing with anttasks and android development tools. Its not the tools folks, despite what Joe Hewitt claims. Its the knowledge of hacking up the tools to do what you want!