I'm afraid you did get it wrong - it's very standard to do that on all Android apps. The part that you missed is that reflection is rarely used in production ap

I'm afraid you did get it wrong - it's very standard to do that on all Android apps. The part that you missed is that reflection is rarely used in production apps (partially because for a long time, reflection was VERY expensive on Dalvik/ART runtimes) and can be easily handled by configuration for minifier/optimizer to explicitly keep code. Even C++ you mention does that - you have explicit __attribute__ calls to avoid linker from dropping code you want to keep for reflection purposes.