DEV Community: Mbuodile Obiosio

When Every Zstandard Library Failed on Android, I Built My Own

Mbuodile Obiosio — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:11:02 +0000

Meet unzstd - a pure Java Zstandard (zstd) decoder for Android and the JVM.

What looked like a simple dependency turned into a surprisingly difficult problem.

I needed to decompress zstd-compressed datasets in an Android app. Existing options all had major trade-offs:

aircompressor 2.x depends on "sun.misc.Unsafe", which crashes on Android ART.
aircompressor 3.x moved to "java.lang.foreign", which Android doesn't support.
zstd-jni works well, but requires native ".so" files, ABI-specific packaging, and brings additional complexity with newer Android memory page requirements.

I had to build a pure Java alternative so I ported aircompressor's decoder

The result:

✅ No native code
✅ No "Unsafe"
✅ No "java.lang.foreign"
✅ Android API 26+
✅ JVM 9+
✅ Zero "Unsafe" references in the compiled bytecode (verified)

To make sure it was actually correct, I differentially tested it against libzstd across compression levels 1-22, covering one-shot decompression, streaming, fuzzing, and corruption-boundary tests.

It's decode-only, Apache 2.0 licensed, and completely open source.

If you're building Android or Java applications that consume zstd-compressed data, I hope this saves you a few days of debugging.

implementation("com.qyntrax:unzstd:0.1.0")

GitHub: https://github.com/mbobiosio/unzstd

Feedback, bug reports, and contributions are always welcome.

Android #Java #Kotlin #OpenSource #JVM #Zstd #Compression

Android App First Launch

Mbuodile Obiosio — Thu, 12 May 2022 18:48:16 +0000

Did a simple illustration of working with DataStore, Hilt and Coroutines to implement checking if app is launched first time.

Hopefully it helps someone

GitHub Repository

Please leave a star if it helps

Dynamic Feature modules template

Mbuodile Obiosio — Mon, 09 May 2022 07:51:02 +0000

An Android template project following a multi module approach with clean architecture. It has been built following Clean Architecture Principle, Dynamic Feature modules, Repository Pattern, MVVM Architecture in the presentation layer as well as jetpack components.

I created this repository to demonstrate best development practices by utilizing up to date tech-stack.

Dynamic Feature Modules and Dynamic Delivery?
Dynamic feature modules allow separation of certain features and resources from the base module of the app and include them in the app bundle. User can then download and install these modules later when they are required(on demand) even after the app has already been installed.

Dynamic Delivery is Google Play's app serving model that uses Android App Bundles to generate and server optimized APKs for each user's device configuration so that users download only the feature and resources the need to run the app.

Play Feature Delivery allow certain features of the app to be delivered conditionally (depending on user's language, location/country, paying or free user etc.) or downloaded on demand.

Github Repository

ModularAppTemplate

Mbuodile Obiosio — Mon, 09 May 2022 07:32:07 +0000

An Android template project following a multi module approach with clean architecture. It has been built following Clean Architecture Principle, Repository Pattern, MVVM Architecture in the presentation layer as well as jetpack components.

I created this repository to demonstrate best development practices by utilizing up to date tech-stack.

Details
Operating System : Android
Programming Language: Kotlin
Architecture : MVVM
Dependency Injection : Hilt
Fragment Management : Navigation Component
Design : Material Design 3

Github Repository

MoviesBoard - TMDB API project

Mbuodile Obiosio — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 14:45:41 +0000

MoviesBoard app showcases Android best practices with Google's recommended architecture: MVVM + Repository + Offline support + Android Architecture Components + Paging 3 + LiveData + Moshi + Coroutines + Material Theme Components + Retrofit2.

I would appreciate more contributions

Github Repository

ConnectivityLifeData for API 30 & lower APIs

Mbuodile Obiosio — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 18:48:50 +0000

I made this super lightweight library to enable Android Developers handle network changes across API 16 to 30.

mbobiosio / LiveDataConnection

A super simple, super light-weight lifecycle aware solution written in Kotlin that helps you to capture network connectivity events with support for lower APIs

USAGE

Including in your project

Add below codes to your root build.gradle

allprojects {
   repositories {
      maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
   }
}

Add connectionlivedata dependency to your project's module build.gradle

implementation 'com.github.mbobiosio:connectionlivedata:1.0.3'

Use in your Activity

 val connectionLiveData = ConnectionLiveData(this)
 connectionLiveData.observe(this, {
     Log.d("Status", "$it")
 })

Use in your Fragment

 val connectionLiveData = ConnectionLiveData(activity as Activity)
 connectionLiveData.observe(viewLifecycleOwner, {
    Log.d("Status", "$it")
 })

Contribute

If you want to contribute to this app, you're always welcome! See Contributing Guidelines.

📝 License

This project is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.

MIT License
Copyright (c) 2020 Mbuodile Obiosio

Permission is hereby

…

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Feel to create a pull request.