title: Xamarin Linking in Release mode with Proguard
body: <p>I'm working on a <strong>Xamarin Forms</strong> app for Android and iOS. We use a third-party SDK that comes as an <code>.aar</code> package, build action set to <code>LibraryProjectZip</code>. Then, we have calls from the forms, the iOS, and the Android parts of the code. Linking works just fine in debug mode if I remember correctly.</p>
  <p>I'm failing to get the <code>Linker+ProGuard</code> work together. I've read for days and experimented with numerous solutions. I was having <code>java codes 1 and 2</code> - so I updated ProGuard and it started working. Then Linking was producing errors - <code>UnauthorizedAccessException</code> so I had to go to the respective folder and remove the <code>ReadOnly</code> permission. Then the project is built successfully but the app functionality is lost even though it runs and in <code>Device Log</code> I can see that some classes are missing.</p>
  <p>To fix that, I created a <code>ProGuard.cfg</code> and added most of the assemblies that were crashing with the <code>&quot;-keep&quot;</code> command. However, I can't seem to find a way to preserve the functionality from this <code>.aar</code> package</p>
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>
  <p>I'm using VS 2017 and Xamarin 7.4 on Windows 10 with JDK  1.8, running as Administrator. Tried linking <code>Sdk Assemblies / User&amp;Sdk Assemblies</code>. <code>Multidex</code> is on. I've tried putting the names of the assemblies of all the projects in the Skip Linking Assemblies field, no results. In the device log, I get a package name for the call that is failing so I tried adding this to ProGuard too but it didn't help. (it looked like <code>&quot;-keep class com.something.something&quot;</code>)</p>