I just hit a weird thing: our app would crash with the following error:

java.lang.LinkageError: Method void com.example.h72.a() overrides final method in class Lcom.example/de; (declaration of 'com.example.h72' appears in base.apk)

. That’s after obfuscation with R8. The cause was we’d have the following class hierarchy:

androidx.lifecycle.ViewModel <- BaseViewModel <- SomeViewModel

, and in

SomeViewModel

we’d have a

fun clear() { }

method. However, method with same name and signature appears in `androidx.lifecycle.ViewModel.java`:

final void clear()

. What I quite don’t understand is, why everything works without R8? I clearly see

public final void clear()

method in the decompiled

SomeViewModel

, and so feels like things should crash straight away. What happens instead, app works fine without R8 and only crashes with it. 😕 Any idea what might be the reason?

I am pretty sure I filed a bug to Google with this exact issue

@Zach Kovar I had a feeling it might be a bug in R8 (it shouldn’t really make the app crash) but thought maybe someone has more insight into this.

Well it's opened in the wrong place 😉 Open R8 issues at https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=componentid:326788%20status:open they are reactive, efficient and nice 🙂

Come to look back at it - I can't find the issue I thought I filed, so maybe I didn't 😅 I just renamed the method to something other than

clear()

which is kind of a blah fix, but at least it was a work-around

@Tolriq thanks for the hint, I noticed that too and already reopened it at https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/148429150