PBandK 0.10.0.beta3 incompatible with Firebase Performance monitoring 19.0.10 or lower

I’ve found a side effect of updating the protobuf-javalite version to 3.15.5 in 0.10.0.beta.3: now pbandk is only compatible with Firebase performance monitoring 19.0.11 (or higher): https://firebase.google.com/support/release-notes/android#performance_v19-0-11

This is because Firebase performance monitoring below 19.0.11 hasprotobuf-javalite:3.11.0 as a transitive dependency and when Gradle resolves this to a newer version (due to pbandk-runtime), this causes a runtime crash when minification is enabled:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to resume activity {<packagename>/<packagename>.MainActivity}: java.lang.ClassCastException: c.c.h.z0 cannot be cast to java.lang.String
        at android.app.ActivityThread.performResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:4444)
        at android.app.ActivityThread.handleResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:4476)
        at android.app.servertransaction.ResumeActivityItem.execute(ResumeActivityItem.java:52)
        at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.executeLifecycleState(TransactionExecutor.java:176)
        at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.execute(TransactionExecutor.java:97)
        at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2066)
        at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106)
        at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:223)
        at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:7656)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
        at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:592)
        at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:947)
     Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: c.c.h.z0 cannot be cast to java.lang.String
        at c.c.h.j1.S(SourceFile:507)
        at c.c.h.j1.Q(SourceFile:227)
        at c.c.h.y0.e(SourceFile:77)
        at c.c.h.y0.a(SourceFile:71)
        at c.c.h.w1.d(SourceFile:90)
        at c.c.h.w1.e(SourceFile:104)
        at com.google.protobuf.GeneratedMessageLite.makeImmutable(SourceFile:175)
        at com.google.protobuf.GeneratedMessageLite$b.n(SourceFile:397)
        at com.google.protobuf.GeneratedMessageLite$b.l(SourceFile:405)
        at com.google.firebase.perf.metrics.AppStartTrace.onActivityResumed(SourceFile:219)
        at android.app.Application.dispatchActivityResumed(Application.java:436)
        at android.app.Activity.dispatchActivityResumed(Activity.java:1379)
        at android.app.Activity.onResume(Activity.java:1905)
        at b.k.b.e.onResume(SourceFile:411)
        at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnResume(Instrumentation.java:1456)
        at android.app.Activity.performResume(Activity.java:8135)
        at android.app.ActivityThread.performResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:4434)
        at android.app.ActivityThread.handleResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:4476) 
        at android.app.servertransaction.ResumeActivityItem.execute(ResumeActivityItem.java:52) 
        at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.executeLifecycleState(TransactionExecutor.java:176) 
        at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.execute(TransactionExecutor.java:97) 
        at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2066) 
        at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106) 
        at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:223) 
        at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:7656) 
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) 
        at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:592) 
        at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:947) 

Notice how nasty of a bug this is:

1. Minification needs to be enabled
2. This happens on implicitly loading Firebase performance monitoring via a ContentProvider at app startup -> so the stacktrace doesn’t have any meaningful information.

I think this could potentially be solvable by adding specific Proguard exclusions to tackle this error, but I haven’t been able to pin down what those exceptions should be yet. Also I’m doubtful whether this is something that should be solved within pbandk…

Should we maybe add a section with known issues to the release notes or readme?

Edit: minification is not required to reproduce this bug

[garyp]

Ugh, that’s terrible. I’m quite surprised that a library like protobuf does not provide proper ABI compatibility between releases. But I just went digging in their docs and apparently the lite runtime has no compatibility guarantees 😞

From https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/java/README.md#compatibility-notice:

Protobuf LITE runtime APIs are not stable yet. They are subject to change even in minor version releases.

And from https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/java/lite.md:

Note that in order to achieve maximum performance and code size, we will NOT guarantee API/ABI stability for Java Lite. If this is not acceptable for your use-case, please use the full Java runtime instead.

I don’t understand how they could expect this to work when protobuf-javalite is a transitive dependency for so many other projects.

[JeroenMols]

So basically, the issue is that the combination of

    implementation "com.google.protobuf:protobuf-javalite:3.14.0"
    implementation "com.google.firebase:firebase-perf:19.0.9"

Crashes at runtime with message com.google.protobuf.MapEntryLite cannot be cast to java.lang.String

And having pbandk as a dependency in a project might cause this, but likely other dependencies would as well.

Solution is to update firebase-perf to 19.0.11 or higher