Benefits of GSON over normal JSON parse
GSON has been successfully used in several android apps that are in Google Play today. The benefit you get with GSON is that object mapping can save the time spent writing code. As for the implications on memory usage, you can use the fromJson() method call that takes a streaming JSONReader to minimize the String data that is kept in memory, failing which you can try to parse the json data using a JSONReader yourself.
the GSON's goals is well described on official page:
Gson Goals:
- Provide simple toJson() and fromJson() methods to convert Java objects to JSON and vice-versa
- Allow pre-existing unmodifiable objects to be converted to and from JSON
- Extensive support of Java Generics
- Allow custom representations for objects
- Support arbitrarily complex objects (with deep inheritance hierarchies and extensive use of generic types)