DashO 11 Release: Licensing, Bug Fixes, and Improved Functionality

“Better licensing means more flexibility,” said CTO Bill Leach during a recent presentation on the release of DashO 11 – PreEmptive’s Android and Java Protection Product. “The new floating license and product activation features allow users to provision DashO on the fly – for example, on cloud hosted build agents that don’t already have DashO preinstalled. By specifying the license key at run time, development teams can more easily automate their builds, no matter where they run.”

Revamped licensing and activation are not the only updates in this latest version—other highlights include:

• Improvements to the control flow, renaming and removal transforms, for stronger protection.
• Updates to the DashO Gradle Plugin for Android, and the DashO Gradle Plugin for Java.
• A new Release Checklist section in the user guide gives users a sense of what they should consider before, during, and after integrating DashO into their projects. By identifying and documenting these “best practices”, we continue our efforts to lower the cost of protection and provide the best support in the industry.

There are also some breaking changes: most importantly, we have changed the minimum Java runtime requirement to Java 8. Running DashO with older or unsupported versions of Java (specifically Java 7, 9, and 10) is no longer supported. We now recommend running with Java 11, and DashO includes JRE 11.0.8 in its installers.

For a complete list of all the changes in DashO 11, please review the changelog. If you are upgrading from an older version, please see the Upgrading section in the user guide.

A recent customer had this to say of DashO: “The tool is quite complete and has most of the features you would expect in an obfuscator solution: renaming, control flow obfuscation, string encryption, and the like. Pricing was great before licensing changes and continues to be very good after. Very good balance between capabilities and pricing”