How to reduce apk bloat through library usage?

Question

Hi all, I added google-collect-1.0.jar to my Android project and it made a 50K .apk into a 250k .apk (both Release).

This was all through using a single method Lists.newArrayList()

Is there any way to reduce the overhead?

Answer 1

If you're only using a single method, which from looking at the source amounts to this:

public static <E> ArrayList<E> newArrayList() {
    return new ArrayList<E>();
}

..then why not just implement that yourself (or at a minimum include only Lists.java) in your project?