Hmm, yeah, but only partly-- The reason they can tinker with it is that it's not public; if it were public it would (hopefully) be better-defined, locked down

Hmm, yeah, but only partly-- The reason they can tinker with it is that it's not public; if it were public it would (hopefully) be better-defined, locked down and stable, part of the Android compatibility test suite. That feature request would let people supply their own sqlite.so, and also redirect the Java API to use it. Seems like a very promising approach.