Question

In the ProGuard docs it reads: “Google’s Dalvik VM can’t handle overloaded static fields.”
As I understand it, something like this

public class A {
  private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(A.class.getName());
...
}

public class B extends A {
  private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(B.class.getName());
...
}

is bad on Android then. It this really true or did I get something wrong?
What are the implication then (I can run my code now but dex fails after proguard treatment)?

Answer 1

I assume it means you can’t have two fields in class A, both named log, each of different types:

public class A {
  private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(A.class.getName());
  private static final int log = 5;
  ...
}

You can’t do this in source code, but tools like ProGuard can generate .class files like this that make decompilation more interesting.

You don’t need to worry about your B extends A example; that would be a bug in Dalvik. Such a bug would be fixed very promptly!