General troubleshooting

In the rare case that the application does not start after it has been successfully integrated, there may be various causes for this so first disable all bindings and any obfuscation of the Java code of the application.

This can be performed by creating a new rules file (rules-no-bindings.cfg) where the following lines should be added:

# disable all bindings
untouchable *;

These lines will ensure that no bindings are created for any parts of the application. Next, the Shielding Tool should be run with the following arguments to point to this rules file and ensure the debug version of App Shielding is included.

java -jar Shielder.jar <app.apk> \
  --rules rules-no-bindings.cfg --debug \
  --keystore <keystore.jks> --storepass <password> \
  --keyname <alias> --keypass <password>

This version of the application should work with these settings, since the Shielding Tool has made very few changes to the application.

At this point you can try re-enabling features one by one.

1. Re-enable bindings gradually (see Troubleshooting binding). This can be somewhat time consuming in certain cases.

2. (Optional) Enable full app obfuscation. If the application should be completely obfuscated then this can be enabled with the --obfuscate-app option.

The effort needed to enable obfuscation is not fully automatic, and is comparable to the effort needed when integrating ProGuard and other similar code shrinking and obfuscation tools. See Obfuscation for more details.