Android: my application is too large and gives “Unable to execute dex: method ID not in [0, 0xffff]: 65536”?

Question

I am trying to integrate my application with Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. All 3 of these services require a number of 3rd party jars. Additionally, my application alrea

Answer 1

The Dalvik VM can have a maximum of 65536 methods per dex file, due to the bytecode instruction set not having a way to refer to method numbers requiring more than 16 bits (as pointed out by @danfuzz in the comments).

While it is possible to fix this using multiple dex files, Facebook found another fix that they could deploy within their app to get around the problem.