Opening a container costs ~4 s and the iteration count belongs to the desktop format, so the fix is to stop repeating it: derive once per snapshot, then read a local AES file which the hardware accelerates. The key is generated inside the Keystore and never leaves it - the file alone is useless, even rooted.
ETag and vault are encrypted together on purpose: an ETag outliving an unreadable vault would make the server answer 304 with nothing to show. A failed read wipes the cache rather than guessing.
Also normalises every Delphi source to pure ASCII: Delphi reads a BOM-less file as ANSI, so accented comments came back as mojibake, and each PowerShell rewrite added another layer.
The harness stored the ETag on download, so a first attempt with no password left a valid tag behind: the next call answered 304 and there was nothing to decrypt, precisely when the right password had just been typed. Sending If-None-Match without holding the matching plaintext trades a download for having no data - the real client needs the same rule, the tag belonging to the cached vault.
Also drops an em dash from an exception message: Delphi reads a BOM-less source as ANSI and it reached the device as mojibake.
Measured on device: Android derives the same key as WebCrypto on a non-ASCII password, so PBEKeySpec does encode as UTF-8 - the doubt that justified the Pascal implementation was unfounded. It is barely faster though, 3869 ms against 4139 ms: PBKDF2 gets no hardware acceleration.
So 4 seconds per container is incompressible, and the iteration count belongs to the desktop format. The answer is not to speed up the derivation but to stop repeating it: derive once per snapshot, then keep the vault locally under an Android Keystore key. Written up in android-client/README.md.
generateSecret takes a KeySpec; passing a JObject made the bridge emit a signature no method matches, and the call failed at runtime. Swallowed as 'unavailable', which hid my own mistake for a full test round - the failure now carries its exception message.
Measured on device: the Pascal PBKDF2 takes 6651 ms, unusable per unlock. AES-GCM through JNI works, plaintext and hash match the vector, so the container format is validated end to end.
The Pascal loop takes 1736 ms on a desktop CPU, so several seconds on a phone - too slow for every unlock. SecretKeyFactory is native and roughly an order of magnitude faster, but PBEKeySpec takes a char[] and the provider picks the encoding, which was the reason for avoiding it.
The non-ASCII vector settles it on a real device: same key means the provider uses UTF-8 and we adopt it; a different key means the Pascal implementation stays. DecryptContainer keeps using the Pascal one until that measurement says otherwise.
PBKDF2 is implemented in Pascal rather than through javax.crypto SecretKeyFactory: PBEKeySpec takes a char[] and the provider decides how those chars become bytes, so a non-ASCII sync password would derive a different key than the browser and fail as 'wrong password'. AES-GCM does go through JNI - one call, hardware-backed, and WebCrypto's tag-appended layout is exactly what Cipher expects.
The vector is generated with WebCrypto itself and uses a non-ASCII password on purpose; an ASCII-only vector would have hidden that bug. It records the derived key separately from the plaintext so a failure points at one stage instead of the whole chain.
r-zakarya