Benefit of using Parcelable instead of serializing object

Serializable is comically slow on Android. Borderline useless in many cases in fact.

Parcel and Parcelable are fantastically quick, but its documentation says you must not use it for general-purpose serialization to storage, since the implementation varies with different versions of Android (i.e. an OS update could break an app which relied on it).

The best solution for the problem of serializing data to storage at a reasonable speed is to roll your own. I personally use one of my own utility classes which has a similar interface to Parcel and which can serialize all the standard types very efficiently (at the expense of type safety). Here's an abridged version of it :

public interface Packageable {
    public void readFromPackage(PackageInputStream in)  throws IOException ;
    public void writeToPackage(PackageOutputStream out)  throws IOException ; 
}


public final class PackageInputStream {

    private DataInputStream input;

    public PackageInputStream(InputStream in) {
        input = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(in));
    }

    public void close() throws IOException {
        if (input != null) {
            input.close();
            input = null;
        }       
    }

    // Primitives
    public final int readInt() throws IOException {
        return input.readInt();
    }
    public final long readLong() throws IOException {
        return input.readLong();
    }
    public final long[] readLongArray() throws IOException {
        int c = input.readInt();
        if (c == -1) {
            return null;
        }
        long[] a = new long[c];
        for (int i=0 ; i<c ; i++) {
            a[i] = input.readLong();
        }
        return a;
    }

...

    public final String readString()  throws IOException {
        return input.readUTF();
    }