Android keyboard always runs in its own process. No distinction between first-party and third-party either as they're both just regular apps like the launcher or browser. One simply is the default.
The goal here was to get the binary size to be small enough, not the smallest it could possibly be. The tool was written in 2 hours because I used a language I was proficient in. While I love me some Rust it would easily double if not triple the time it would take me to build the thing in the first place
If that's the real Jake Wharton, I have to say I am a big fan of the tools/libs (and their quality) you wrote for Android. They were especially useful 7-5 years ago, when the "official" libs were pathetically crappy :).
The final section of the post was a Java port and size comparison. It also noted that while it was smaller, I simply don't want to use Java and the minute any external dependency is added (such as for CLI parsing) I'm right back to needing R8 for minifying.
I removed that part since the post was long enough.
