Android :: Alternative Way To Grab Progress On Multipart/form Upload

As described in this answer you cannot grab a progress of a multipart/form POST upload in Android using only the Android SDK, because there is an issue with the stream buffering when using HttpURLConnection which will be fixed post Froyo (see http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3164#c6).

Since the Apache HttpClient 3.1 was removed from the SDK quite early and the new HttpClient, which is now part of the SDK, wasn't adopted completely (it misses multipart capabilities) you can add the missing parts (specifically apache-mime4j-0.6.jar and httpmime-4.0.1.jar) to perform a multipart/form-data upload AND grab the progress of the upload (also described in the answer mentioned above).

Now, the reason why I open a new question is, that doing as described leads to an enormous growth of the installed app size (in my case from 170kb to 732kb).

So, the question is: Is there any other way to perform a multipart/form-data upload and grab the upload progress without increasing the app size that much? Are there any other libraries one can use or is there any other alternative way, not mentioned here?