Why We Built the Guardsquare Community: An Open Letter from ProGuard’s Creator

Years ago, I created ProGuard as a hobby project and open-sourced the code. As ProGuard’s popularity grew, I saw a need to also address a gap in the market around mobile security for iOS and Android applications. 

This led me to create Guardsquare. Since 2014, Guardsquare has been the corporate steward for ProGuard. We’ve taken the lead on regularly updating the product and the code. More than one million developers use ProGuard in their apps, and they often turn to GitHub, StackOverflow, and other developer communities for help. These are excellent resources but sometimes aren’t specialized enough for mobile application optimization and shrinking questions. 

Additionally, we want people to be able to communicate with the Guardsquare team directly and share their thoughts and suggestions candidly. 

This is why we launched the brand-new Guardsquare Community.

What is the Guardsquare Community?

The Guardsquare Community is a dedicated place for mobile application developers, enthusiasts, and security professionals to:

• Engage in discussions with a network of other ProGuard users, app developers, and people who work on ProGuard
• Take advantage of and contribute to our library of user-generated rules for ProGuard to simplify implementations
• Share thoughts and product feedback on an open forum about anything related to mobile app development, optimization, and security. We're listening!
• Get support and have questions answered by the developer team responsible for creating and maintaining ProGuard and other Guardsquare products
• Get immediate, detailed updates about any ProGuard- and Guardsquare-related news, release notes, and relevant events
• Access open source projects, tutorials, and resources
• Showcase your own expertise among peers by publishing blogs and proposing code fixes for our team to endorse

Those responding to questions and sharing information will include the engineers who have been managing the quality of ProGuard’s open source code for many years. And, of course, the community is 100% open and free to use.

This is all part of Guardsquare’s ongoing stewardship of ProGuard. I wrote about the importance of focused, dedicated corporate attention to open source projects earlier in 2020. Launching the Guardsquare Community is our next step in continuing to evolve, improve, and make ProGuard accessible to even more developers.

I encourage developers, mobile app enthusiasts, and security professionals to join our community, and to help us build it. That’s the beauty of open source—it gets better through the contributions of many.