Mobile apps are no stranger to issues of cloning, and Amazon is trying to help developers avoid having their work copied by advising them to obfuscate their code. In a post on its developer blog, Amazon provides a quick walkthrough to show developers how to go about modifying their code so that it's difficult to reverse engineer. Using a program called Proguard it's possible to not only make code hard for a person or machine to understand, but to also both shrink and optimize it.

The process looks relatively quick and painless, though Amazon points out that certain aspects of the code can't be obfuscated, including the app store's newly implemented in-app purchasing feature. In that case, Amazon says that the code needs to be clean so that purchase data is easily accessible. And considering how important in-app purchases are for the Amazon store, developers will probably want to stay clear of messing with the feature anyways.