org.json.issue

Minimal reproduction of an unexplained issue described in Issue Tracker 283422335.

Issue

Steps to reproduce

1. Sync and run the application in both debug and release variants.
2. Comment out / remove the dependency on com.pubnub:pubnub-kotlin:7.4.2 in :module-b.
   • This pulls in org.json:json:20230227 transitively.
3. Sync and run the application in both debug and release variants.

Expected results

org.json.JSONObject from the Android platform is used in all four cases.

Actual results

org.json.JSONObject from the Android platform is only used in the following cases:

1. debug with PubNub dependency.
2. debug without PubNub dependency.
3. release without PubNub dependency.

However in the following case (the most important one) org.json.JSONObject comes from and external library dependency.

Why is this important?

As noted in the issue report the behaviour of JSONObject::getString with respect to null values is different between the Android Platform version and the external library version. This behaviour difference can cause application crashes which can be very difficult to understand since Android Studio takes you to the Android Platform version of JSONOBject.

Notes

This is probably some weird Proguard / R8 issue here or a niche issue in our project setup.