#Xamarin mac app obfuscation app how to

There are free tools for obfuscation so why not just do it, what’s the harm? First of all, it can hamper crash reporting.

NET code be compiled to native when an app is published to the App Store. This is turned on by default for your iOS apps, since Apple requires that. Along with this you should also consider ahead of time (AOT) compilation on Android which will make it harder to decompile your app. If this is impossible or impractical then yes obfuscation is an option. If you do have something special in your app, you should really consider if there are ways to move it to the server. If you are obfuscating to protect your APIs then the effort should be put into securing these properly. Yes, it may have been expensive to develop and serves some business purpose, but if there are no proprietary algorithms or business rules then it’s not really something a competitor could use to gain an advantage from stealing. I have seen many developers and corporations put a higher value on their application code than is warranted. The first question is whether your code is really worth protecting. The only way to completely protect it is to put any code that is critically important to your business, your “secret sauce”, on a secure server and access it via APIs. The reality is that you can never completely protect your app code, and if someone wants your code bad enough they can use decompilers and hard work to get it, even if you obfuscate.

#Xamarin mac app obfuscation app how to

I feel the first question is whether you need to, and not how to do it. I saw a question recently about how to protect code in a Xamarin app package.

This blog on securing your source code is from Premier Developer consultant Bill Reiss.