just curious, is Smack stuck using StAX / XMLPullParser because Android does not come with a SAX implementation?
Android does come with a SAX implementation. But using it for Smack would mean that every Provider needs to be rewritten to SAX, and honestly I see no one doing that in the future. I also see no need to switch to a different parsing technique because we have well tested Provider using XML pull parsing.
But if somebody offers a complete code rewrite, I would consider it.
To my knowledge, SAX is more performant that StAX, but StAX is simpler to use...
Such claims are usually worthless without some references. And it also depends on the conrecte implementation. Furthermore "simplier to use" is somewhat subjective.