[dotnick]

I remember reading somewhere that lint might give false positives if you refer to resources in your Java code instead of the xml.

From the README:

If you have references to elements in an old layout that you're not using anymore, you will get a compile error that the ID (R.id.<something>) can not be found. The reason is that the resource file that contained R.id.<something> has been removed as it was not used any more. Time to clean up your code.

If there is a reference to the resource somewhere doesn't that mean that the resource is in use?

[philippb]

we haven't encountered any problems with lint. Your app will just not compile and tell you whats missing.

The case from the readme is: We were loading view A. Then we looked for R.id.something in view A in a method.

Later we replaced view A with B, but never took out R.id.something that was referring to view A (it was also never used). This never caused problems as view A was still in the resources.

Lint marks view A as unused as no activity is ever loading it. After removing A, R.id.something can not be found anymore and you will get a compile error. It was time to remove that dead reference.