Android: my application is too large and gives "Unable to execute dex: method ID not in [0, 0xffff]: 65536"?

Question

I am trying to integrate my application with Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. All 3 of these services require a number of 3rd party jars. Additionally, my application already requires a few 3rd party jars. Now when I try to run my application from eclipse I get the following error:

Unable to execute dex: method ID not in [0, 0xffff]: 65536 Conversion to Dalvik format failed: Unable to execute dex: method ID not in [0, 0xffff]: 65536

It seems that this error occurs because my application has too many methods. I'm fairly certain the bulk of these methods are from the 3rd party jars, so it is unrealistic to try to solve this by simplifying my code. I found these two suggestions online.

1. add dex.force.jumbo=trueto project.properties (and use adt version 21). I did this but still get the error.

2. Use multiple dex files as explained here: http://android-developers.blogspot.co.il/2011/07/custom-class-loading-in-dalvik.html. This seems likely to be the only option, but I don't understand how it applies in my case. The issue is that services like Drive have too many dependencies. Wouldn't this solution require that I modify the Drive source to use inflection when referring to its dependencies? (this is clearly not an option).

3. Use proguard to shrink remove unused code/methods. Exporting my application with proguard does work, and the document service integration works as expected on a >4.0 device. However, classnotfound errors are thrown when testing on a 2.3 device.

So, I am hoping for some advice on this issue. Is option 2 a solution for my case? Is there another solution I should consider?

Answer 1

You can also develop one or more of these as a plugin to your main app, in the form of a separate APK available for download. That APK would expose some component that the main app would use -- since I do not know the nature of your integration with these services, I cannot make a more specific recommendation about that. You would use your own signature-level custom <permission> to secure communications between the two apps. And, as a bonus, if using the third-party library adds requirements for additional permissions, you would only need those permissions in the plugin APK, keeping your main APK smaller.