Fetches the opaque container and the ETag; a 304 skips both the download and the 4-second derivation, which is the whole point of keeping the tag between calls. Redirects are not followed - one to another host would send the bearer token there.
Local testing goes through adb reverse tcp:8080 tcp:80, which makes the phone reach the PC as 127.0.0.1 and satisfies the endpoint's loopback exemption. That needs usesCleartextTraffic in the manifest, marked for removal before shipping.
Two stages tested separately, because a global failure says nothing about where: PBKDF2 against the known derived key - which also runs on Win64, so that stage validates in seconds without deploying to a phone - then AES-GCM against the plaintext hash, Android only.
The vector is embedded as a unit rather than read from a file: no network, no deployment, so a first-run failure can only come from the decryption itself. Work runs on a thread; 600k HMAC rounds on the UI thread would have Android kill the app for not responding.
r-zakarya