It makes sense for some use cases but the vast majority of use cases, parsing overhead is simply not a concern. Mobile phones are fast, networks have plenty of

It makes sense for some use cases but the vast majority of use cases, parsing overhead is simply not a concern. Mobile phones are fast, networks have plenty of bandwidth (and the savings are marginal), parsers are pretty good. But done right, binary protocols are sometimes worth the marginal savings they provide. We switched over one of our APIs to use CBOR instead of json. It's a search API that we hit a lot and I wanted to cut down on the bytesize of the responses a little. The savings are not that impressive. But I'll take 10% when i can get it. Otherwise, this was a pretty simple change. We use kotlinx serialization in a multi-platform library. Basically, all we did is configure it to use CBOR instead of json. https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/blob/master/docs/formats.md https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/blob/master/... Half hour job. Haven't looked at it since; just works. It supports protobuf as well but it looked like more hassle to set up so we went with CBOR instead.