VerifyError (TabLayout & AdMob SDK)

Published on: July 13, 2019

Getting errors or crashes right after updating dependencies and pushing the update to production can be very frustrating!

Material Components (TabLayout)

I updated the Google Material Components library to 1.1.0-alpha07 and it worked fine. Pushed the update to production at 2% users.

As I have a good userbase for my apps so, I never push my apps to 100% until I’m sure that everything is fine.

The crashes I got were 100% from 4.x devices, a little investigation and I found that Proguard/R8 stripped TabLayout$Tab class during app build process.

But, I found a solution where you’d have to keep the TabLayout$Tab class, so the solution was to add the following in the proguard file –

properties

–keep class com.google.android.material.tabs.TabLayout$Tab { *; }

AdMob SDK

The issue I faced with updated AdMob SDK (18.1.0) was slightly different.
I used the same as above for the missing class, here AdView, but still got the crash on a 4.x emulator.

The package was – com.google.android.gms.ads.AdView, so I added the class in the proguard as follows –

properties

–keep class com.google.android.gms.ads.AdView { *; }

But it still did not work!

I tried by removing the AdView and keeping the whole "ads" package & that didn't work too.

As a last resort, I kept the whole "gms" package & it worked. The final solution was –

properties

–keep class com.google.android.gms.** { *; }