First of all, please note that I'm not expecting why do you want to obfuscate library comments. This is a genuine problem I'm asking about.

I have been having an issue dealing with R8/obfuscation with an Android library written in Kotlin.

I've a public API method which is annotated with @JvmStatic and that method takes a Lambda as parameter.

For example, take a look at code below,

typealias MyLambdaCallback = (String, Map<String, Any>) -> Unit

@Keep
object MyApi {

    private var callback: MyLambdaCallback? = null

    @JvmStatic
    fun setCallback(callback: MyLambdaCallback) {
        this.callback = callback
    }
}

I have added @Jvmstatic so that Java calling code can call the method statically rather than doing MyApi.INSTANCE.setCallback()

When I release the library without minification, everything is fine and calling code from both Java and Kotlin is written as expected.

But now I want to release the library while turning on minification.

That creates an issue.

Here is the error

java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError: The method 'void setCallback(kotlin.jvm.functions.Function2)' was expected to be of type virtual but instead was found to be of type static (declaration of 'com.demo.basic.Application' appears in /data/app/com.demo.basic-_0uJXPbtfs3UZ2Rp2h-RdQ==/base.apk!classes2.dex)

Am I making a mistake somewhere or this is expected as some kind of limitation ?

What did I Try ?

1. Removing @Jvmstatic resolves the issue but it created ugly Java calling code

2. Kept @Jvmstatic but removed Lambda converting Lambda into an interface with one method and everything is working fine. Unfortunately SAM for Kotlin classes is not there yet, so calling Kotlin code looks ugly.