I use the TinyBus library to dispatch events in my app. MinSDK is 15, compile SDK is 23.
On pre-21 devices, I'm facing the issue which seems to affect many apps that use reflection. As soon as I try to register on the bus in my base Activity class (which inherits from the AppCompatActivity), I get the following crash log:
E/AndroidRuntime: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: android/os/PersistableBundle
E/AndroidRuntime: at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime: at java.lang.Class.getPublicMethodsRecursive(Class.java:955)
E/AndroidRuntime: at java.lang.Class.getMethods(Class.java:938)
E/AndroidRuntime: at de.halfbit.tinybus.impl.ObjectsMeta.<init>(ObjectsMeta.java:58)
E/AndroidRuntime: at de.halfbit.tinybus.TinyBus.processQueue(TinyBus.java:346)
E/AndroidRuntime: at de.halfbit.tinybus.TinyBus.register(TinyBus.java:178)
E/AndroidRuntime: at com.package.name.activities.InitializedActivity.onStart(InitializedActivity.java:62)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnStart(Instrumentation.java:1166)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.Activity.performStart(Activity.java:5264)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2047)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2099)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.ActivityThread.access$600(ActivityThread.java:138)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1205)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137)
E/AndroidRuntime: at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4929)
E/AndroidRuntime: at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime: at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:511)
E/AndroidRuntime: at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:798)
E/AndroidRuntime: at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:565)
E/AndroidRuntime: at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
I know that this error is caused by dalvik failing to initialize a class it can't find in the dex file. There is a lot of info and questions related to this issue (since it also affects Otto and others), but so far I have only seen one fix: remove the usage of PersistableBundle from the app. However, I do not reference PersistableBundle anywhere in my code, but the system apparently does.
Is there any other known fix to the problem?
Well, the issue is resolved now. After going through all of my code (which I should have done ages ago) I found out that I actually had references to the PersistableBundle. Those were located in methods I let the IDE generate like onPostCreate(PersistableBundle bundle) and wasn't paying attention to. Replacing all PersistableBundle with Bundle fixed the problem.
To folks having similar issue I can only suggest looking closely at the generated stuff when using newer API.