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"It's reasonable to follow common object-oriented programming practices and have getters and setters in the public interface, but within a class you should always access fields directly." This line makes it sound like its only a rule to avoid accesses within a class. 

There's a bunch of discussion on performance vs code maintainability and they also improved performance after Gingerbread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6716442/android-performance-avoid-internal-getters-setters