Confirm Startup Profiles optimization

You can check that your Startup Profiles are working using either Android Studio or looking at the R8 build metadata.

Confirm with Android Studio

To confirm DEX layout optimization, use Android Studio to open the APK and verify the classes in the DEX files. Make sure the primary classes.dex isn't completely filled. If your app consists of a single DEX file, you can check whether the app contains two DEX files after enabling the Startup Profile.

Android Studio warns you if the startup classes don't fit in a single DEX file. To get diagnostic information that includes the amount of non-startup methods in the startup classes, make sure the R8 compiler is updated to at least version 8.3.36-dev by making the following changes to the settings.gradle file when you apply the Startup Profile:

Kotlin

pluginManagement {
    buildscript {
        repositories {
            mavenCentral()
            maven {
                url = uri("https://storage.googleapis.com/r8-releases/raw")
            }
        }
        dependencies {
            classpath("com.android.tools:r8:8.3.6-dev")
        }
    }
}

Groovy

pluginManagement {
    buildscript {
        repositories {
            mavenCentral()
            maven {
                url uri('https://storage.googleapis.com/r8-releases/raw')
            }
        }
        dependencies {
            classpath 'com.android.tools:r8:8.3.6-dev"
        }
    }
}

Make sure you add --info after assembleRelease in the following command when building with Gradle.

./gradlew assembleRelease --info

The diagnostic is then printed to the terminal.

If your app or any libraries reference any desugared APIs, the bundled compatibility implementations of these classes are always contained in the last DEX file. This desugared last DEX file doesn't participate in DEX layout optimizations.

Confirm with bundle metadata

Starting with AGP 8.8, R8 outputs metadata in your Android App Bundle (AAB) that you can use to check if the DEX layout optimization was successful. To check if the optimization worked, do the following:

Build your app's AAB:
```
./gradlew app:bundleRelease
```
Check that there's at least one DEX file that contains the text "startup": true.
1. Open the metadata:
```
unzip -j -o path-to-aab BUNDLE-METADATA/com.android.tools/r8.json && jq .dexFiles r8.json
```
  The path to your AAB might be something like app/build/outputs/bundle/release/app-release.aab.
2. Check the output, which should look something like this:
```
    inflating: r8.json
[
  {
    "checksum": "f0b4b0ddb295812607f44efe03cf7a830056ccfddbdb81db3760d2281940e951",
    "startup": true
  }
]
```
If you only see "startup": false in the metadata, you need to enable startup profiles and ensure that your startup profile isn't obfuscated.
Check that the SHA-256 values from the metadata match those from the AAB. To get the SHA-256 values for all your DEX files run the following:
```
unzip -o path-to-aab */dex/*.dex && sha256sum */dex/*
```
The output should look something like this:
```
Archive: app/build/outputs/bundle/release/myapp-release.aab
  inflating: base/dex/classes.dex
f0b4b0ddb295812607f44efe03cf7a830056ccfddbdb81db3760d2281940e951  base/dex/classes.dex
```
Compare the hash values to the "checksum" values from step 1. If the SHA-256 values don't match, there might be a compilation step interfering with R8's ability to output DEX files.