17:29

Protocol buffers, Google’s own data exchange format, love em or hate em. They don’t work particularly well on Android because the proto compiler spits out enormous blobs of Java code. Even empty messages will already result in around 15Kb of source and declare more than four dozen methods. Raccoon needs to implement 75 message types in order to talk to the Playstore. That comes down to a bit more than 3 Mb of uncompressed bytecode, scattered across 310 class files with more than 70k methods.

When they came up with Dalvik and the DEX format, they pulled a Bill gates: 65k methods should be enough for everyone. Surprise! Who’d ever think that there would be apps including giant blobs of generated parser code.

So, I don’t want to build a multi DEX APK. Luckily, there’s a protobuf-javalite runtime, promising a smaller footprint (it’s actually what the Playstore APK uses as well). Surprise! I still exceed the 65k limit, plus the normal and the lite runtime don’t seem to be API compatible, so I can’t make a raccoon library that works out of the box on PC and Android. Thanks Google! You really put an effort into making Android a compatibility hell on every level!