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I'm a blogger and I've been publishing third party android apps and games on my website since a couple of years ago. There are some exclusive apps which I need to put some toast messages in them. I'm novice at this but my question is about something different. I just want to obfuscate a prebuilt APK app or just a particular string in the activity. There are so many articles or tutorial videos in the web in which people trying to teach this method by ProGuard in Android Studio. But I couldn't even find a single tutorial which explains How to add a prebuilt APK (NOT A NEW PROJECT) in Android Studio and obfuscate it. I tried to profile/debug an APK with Android Studio but I can not find the gradle.build to set the minifyEnable to true. I know this might be so stupid to ask, but can anyone help me with this? I just need to obfuscate a string (mostly my toast messages) or the whole classes of a Pre-built APK. Is there an easier way to do this or I have to do it by Android Studio? I would really appreciate if someone tell me how to do it in the easiest way possible. And do not consider me as a programmer or developer.

Behzad
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If you have an unobfuscated .apk file in a folder and want to obfuscate that, then you're out of luck.

Obfuscation works on a much lower level, and is done while the .apk file is being built from the source code.

And Proguard will not do anything at all to obfuscate your strings. Even if the .apk was obfuscated using Proguard, all strings and resources would still be in the .apk file and could easily be read by anyone with a bit of technical know-how.
Proguard obfuscates the code itself, not the resources (resources would be strings, numbers, images, etc)

There are some other methods of obfuscation (DexGuard and Arxan for examples), but those are much much harder to use, even for an experienced developer.

And you mention you want to add a toast message into a prebuilt .apk file? That requires extremely (and i do mean extremely) high knowledge of how the .apk is built, to dissamble it and rebuild it.

Moonbloom
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  • Thanks for the reply @Moonbloom. Have you ever seen any modified android game or app? Once you open them, in most cases, you can see a toast message from the modifier. That toast message is obfuscated most of the time. I need to do the same. I know I said I'm a newcomer, but I'm able to decompile, add toast messages, apply patches, compile and sign an .apk file. So I'm not that rookie. My question is how those modifiers edit apk files, add their toast messages and then obfuscate the Main Activity and its strings like toast messages? Check androeed.ru and you're gonna find what I'm saying. – Behzad Feb 02 '20 at 17:00