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Hitting an arbitrary (and undocumented?) platform limit on the number of methods your app is allowed to have is hardly "painting themselves into a corner".

I'm not sure if it is listed in the official documentation but it was talked about by the Android team on their blog:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/custom-class-...

This appears to discuss the per-dex method limit but makes no mention of the per-process limit.

Welcome to Facebook engineering.

As a programmer if you feel clever, most of the time you're doing something wrong. There might be 1% of code that should or can be clever but I prefer my code to be robust.

They clearly say that "this idea seemed completely insane" so it's not like they took this road lightly. They searched for a solution and became rather desperate. I wonder if they asked Google for help.

Having said that I'm not sure I would be frank about such a crazy hack for a slow behemoth app that is only considered "fast" because the previous version was insultingly slow.