proguard propertie not understood

Question

I am having a hard time understanding what this is doing in proguard: Does it avoid obfocusing all protected methods in all public classes?

-keep public class * {
   public protected *;
}

Please explain or refer to some good explanation

Answer 1

These lines keep all public classes, and inside these public classes, all public and all protected fields and methods. This means that it keeps all public API of the input code, which is suitable for processing libraries.

See the ProGuard manual > Examples > A typical library.