[grishka]

Are you saying that the SDK tools that build apks (aapt? I'm not sure) only compress files selectively? And what kinds of consequences are there if you do compress resources.arsc? I suppose it never keeps a copy in memory but reads it a lot, and if it's compressed, you're taking a performance penalty from it having to decompress the whole thing on every access?

[toast0]

Yes. Take a random apk and look at it with a zip lister. If resource.asrc is compressed, someone didn't use the SDK tools to build it (and I'd be shocked).

What you described is about my understanding of what happens. I would hope it doesn't uncompress the whole thing on every access, but only far enough to read the value; but I'm not sure. Note that it's not just the app itself that uses the app's resources; other elements of the OS use them too.