Android apps reverse engineering

Question

Is there any way to protect an Android applications source code from reverse engineering, as explain in this post: http://blog.darrylsite.com/?p=23 ?

Answer 1

Hm, you are linking to an article in French...

Anyway, using ProGuard should make reverse engineering more difficult, although it can't prevent it completely: Dalvik bytecode contains sufficient clues about an application's structure. Obfuscation (as performed by ProGuard) makes this harder to understand, but given sufficient effort, one will still be able to figure out what is going on.

Answer 2

Your two tools will be code obfuscation and server side-processing.

For the first, obfuscating, the Android team encourages the use of Proguard..

The second is to do your sensitive processing on a server and set up good licensing model. This makes it so the user doesn't have access to even your compiled code. They only get the results of the code and in order to run it you can use licensing to verify they are a valid user. For more information about licensing on Android see Licensing.