Prevent reverse engineering of ionic application - angularjs

Question

Is there a way to prevent reverse engineering of ionic mobile application? As mentioned in Android forum I've activated proguard and built the application in eclipse. A file called proguard was created in my bin folder. It contained something like this
view AndroidManifest.xml #generated:6
-keep class com.fg.lolc.CordovaApp { <init>(...); }
But I still could reverse engineer the app and I was able to get the code from my APK. Is there a way to prevent this and improve the security of the ionic application? Thanks.

Answer 1

Nope, it isn't possible to prevent this. You can encode your JavaScript to make it a little harder to get the code, but there are always ways to reverse that. The web is not a secure place for source code, it is open for all.
Here is a good post about different ways to 'encrypt' your source code, to make it harder to read.
http://www.justbeck.com/three-ways-to-encrypt-phonegap-and-cordova-mobile-applications/
Related How to avoid reverse engineering of an APK file?

Answer 2

if you want secure your ionic app from reverse engineering and fully
secured source code i recommended two steps.
First use Enable ProGuard into cordova/ionic project
1. To implement this, open /platforms/android/project.properties and
uncomment one line by removing the “#” at left:
#proguard.config=${sdk.dir}/tools/proguard/proguard-android.txt:proguard-
project.txt
2.copy proguard-custom.txt from ( https://github.com/greybax/cordova-plugin-
proguard/blob/master/proguard-custom.txt )
to
$android/assets/www/proguard-custom.txt Remove '#'
#-keepclassmembers class android.webkit.WebView {
# public *;
# }
3. add snippet from to build.gradle
Find buildTypes by ctrl + F and add like this
buildTypes {
debug {
minifyEnabled true
useProguard false
proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'),
'proguard-rules.pro'
}
release {
minifyEnabled true
proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'),
'proguard-rules.pro'
}
}
Second use cordova-plugin-crypt-file
obfuscate or encrypt your code like build/main.js
1)Install cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-crypt-file
2)plugins/cordova-plugin-crypt-file/plugin.xml
//Using Refrence of cordova-plugin-crypt
<cryptfiles>
<include>
<file regex="\.(htm|html|js|css)$" />
</include>
<exclude>
<file regex="exclude_file\.js$" />
</exclude>
</cryptfiles>
Final step ionic cordova build android --release
Now extreact your apk or try APK decompiler
(http://www.javadecompilers.com/apk)