Are there any obfuscation benefits when an Android app is separated into multiple projects?

Question

Our team is building a highly secure mobile app in Android. We've a main Android project and a separate security project to implement the security features. One developer each are working on these two. The whole code needs to be obfuscated with a third party tool(which is not yet finalized). Is there any obfuscation advantages in splitting the main Android project into many sub projects , where the UI is in a separate project and backend in another? Does this help in the obfuscation process, its performance or security levels? Is there any way to effectively separate the UI and logic into separate projects?

Answer 1

Not really, not significantly at least. You just end up with a JAR file for each project you create. The difficult part of reverse engineering a compiled JAR is to decipher relevant meaning to obfuscated class, method and variable names, no matter where they are.

Having your obfuscated code in another JAR does not impose any difficulty; the thief still knows where your obfuscated code is.

If your hacker gets thrown off by this, then they are not a good hacker to begin with and probably won't even be able to reverse engineer your app if you put the source in front of their face.