Eclipse - should I clean the project before exporting an APK?

Question

After several late-night debugging nightmares, I've somehow fallen into the paranoid habit of clicking 'Project -> Clean...' in Eclipse every time I'm about to export a signed/unsigned .APK for upload to an App Store. I can only assume that, some time in the distant past, it seemed to be a necessary safeguard when debugging some external JAR or otherwise.

This adds several tedious minutes to the overall export process, particularly with multiple builds and/or apps.

Is this ever a necessary step, or just paranoia?

Answer 1

Cleaning the project recompile all of your classes and it may fix some problems that R.java class cause when resource id's have changed but already compiled classes that refrenced to those id's no longer exist or changed.