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Note: This post is part of a series on D8 and R8, Android’s new dexer and optimizer, respectively. For an intro to D8 read “Android’s Java 8 support”. This post introduces R8. The first three posts (1, 2, 3) in this series explored D8. Among its core responsibility of converting Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode, it desugars new Java language features and works around vendor- and version-specific bugs in Android’s VMs. In general, D8 doesn’t perform optimization. It may choose to use Dalvik byt...