There seems to be countless reports of this bug in Stack Overflow. None of the suggestions worked. In my case it is almost identical to this stack overflow report SPRING
except this case is in Android being built in Android Studio. It only happens in release mode with proguard. Proguard corrupts it somehow. And yes I have done the following in proguard:
-keep class org.eclipse.paho.client.mqttv3.logging.JSR47Logger { *; }
-keep class org.eclipse.paho.** { *; }
I have also parsed the jars downloaded by gradle. I cannot update to 1.2.1 because that only works with the latest versions of Android ... according to comments made by the developers. If I could get the source code for 1.1.0 maybe I could stop it from calling a resource that does not exist.
Anyone solve this problem or is it a bug in proguard/paho?
Looking at the apks generated by release builds (uses proguard) and debug builds (no proguard) shows that proguard is taking the org.eclipse.... package name of the properties and changing the 'org' to some letter like 'c'. The mqtt paho client is looking for the property file using the full package name and therefore cannot find it, no matter what you include or exclude in proguard. I looked at an apk made a few months ago (I have not done anything with the paho client or that part of the code using the paho client ... it has worked fine and I have had no need to change it). I see in that old release apk that the 'org' is there as it should be.
So the problem is in proguard. All I could do to move forward is take the source files for 1.1.0, create a new java project module, and tediously comment out every 'log' and getLogger in the source code. Its a temporary and unpleasant fix but it works. When proguard (R8) fixes this, then I can go back to what I had.
So I guess the only real fix is to submit a bug to R8. That I have not done.