I'm developing an ebook reader app for Android. The special books for this app are zipped files of some html/css/js/image/... files which are in a server and will be downloaded by the app. Each zipped file may have 1-5 MB and if extracted, a lot more than that.
I was wondering, regarding to android guidelines, where is suitable to
Put the zipped book files?
Put the extracted files when they are being used?
Well, if you actually need to save that data when app finishes, you should use sd-card, since it has more space, but if you only download image one time, just to show it on screen than use internal storage. Also consider your lowest API since that will be phone with least storage, and your app needs to work there as well as on new devices. Either way if you have to make several files while extracting data, use internal storage because it will be faster, and move it later to sd card if you actually need to save it.
Related
I am confused with the new app storage system in Android. I am not sure where my use case falls under and I need your help in telling me the right approach for this
My app captures images and generates pdf documents. Prior to Android 10, I used to store them in an app directory where the user can easily navigate to them through other files browsing app (like Files app on Samsung). In addition, these files can be accessed from within my app (so essentially read and write).
With the new storage, I am not sure how to accomplish the same thing. If I use the internal storage then user can't see them. If I use the media approach, well it seems it is only for Audio/video plus they will not be organized in a folder like I have them organized.
Am I missing something? How would I solve this problem?
Thank you
On an Android 11 device you can store your files in a subdirectory of the public Documents directory.
You can do that using classic File means or the media store or SAF.
Other apps can see them using SAF or the media store. Or with classic file means when requested all files access.
The user can see them using the default Files app on the device.
In my Travel app which depends on lot of images. I have implemented a Lazy Loader and Caching of images. In total for all the destinations the images are close to 20mb. If a User wants to download all the Images so that he can still access the app offline. How can i make sure the caching of the files work with the downloaded image files.
There are two possibilities for your app, depending on what exactly you are wanting to do. Feel free to read more about this at the Android Docs.
Internal Storage
This directory persists, and is private to your application. It might have limited space, especially for older devices.
SD Card
This will have much more space, but will be accessible to the user and other apps. You could store information in your private storage to verify the integrity of this data. You will need a permission to write to the card.
I would suggest you choose one of these two, and store your data there. This should persist from run to run. Perhaps you could even include a function that would "Pre-cache" all of the files to the appropriate folder. 20 Mb isn't really that much space, you could even include it in your app itself. It's all up to you.
I making an application with phonegap/cordova where I need to keep a lot of files up to date. Some files (mainly images) will need to be erased in time, and some new ones will get downloaded. The thing is, in Android, to manipulate those files, it seems I need to have them on the sdcard; so I copy the files the app starts with from my assets folder to the sdcard. It just seems like a waste of memory space.
Do you know if is there anyway I can start with the app having those files the app starts with already inside the sdcard? or at least somewhere I can delete them later?
Thank you.
Files that are delivered to the device as part of your APK will be stored in a form that cannot be modified by your application (other than by updating to a new version of the apk).
If you copy the files out of the APK into the private internal storage area or the external storage area, those copies can be modified, but the originals inside the apk will remain.
The most efficient solution may be to not put these files in your apk, but have your app instead download them separately on the first run, using whatever mechanism you wanted to use to change them in the future.
(Some people object to this feeling that such files are less secure against unauthorized use, but as the contents of an .apk are trivial to extract this is not a strong argument. Needing to maintain a server to download from is a slightly more substantial objection.)
You do not need to store the files on the SD Card. Each app has its own internal storage that is not accessible by any other apps. For more information see the official docs: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html
I've been developing this content-based app for Android which includes over 120 MB of video .mp4-files saved on the raw folder and in addition it includes over 20 MB of sound files also saved in the raw folder.
The problem is I cannot install the app on my Android phone due to limited internal memory to handle all those files. Also, I read somewhere that the app size limit on the Android market is 50MB so I won't be able to even upload the damn thing.
I've saved the videos on the raw folder as I was able to play them fine (using VideoView).
My question is how do i cope with such size, do I have to go through making the user download the content after installing the app or is there any other way of dealing with such sizes (~140 MB).
You cannot distribute an APK through the market that is more than 50MB. Its not a good idea to take up 120MB of the internal storage for a single app as many phones don't have a lot of internal storage space.
You should consider stripping out all of the large files, hosting them on a server and then having the application download the files on the first launch. I would also recommend you save the files to the SD card so you don't use up too much of the precious internal storage.
Edit: I will admit that any time an app tries to download a lot of data on the initial launch I get really frustrated. Make sure you do it in a way that doesn't require the activity to be open the entire time the file is downloading. Do the downloading through a service so the user can at least use their phone while your app is downloading the media files.
Well, if you're sure you need all this content inside your application, the only solution I see is to download the content from a server when the application is opened for the first time. But as a user I think I won't be very happy to have a 150 Mb application on my phone. Do you really need all this data?
I have 2 binary files that i would like to package with my apk. (/res/raw)
i need to copy these 2 files to /sdcard when the application is run
how can i do this?
We have the same issue ... the direction we are exploring is to have two separate installs - the first one is the app and the second one is the data-app. When the data-app installs it copies the binary files to the SD card. When we uninstall the data-app it frees up the internal storage.
We don't have this one completely licked yet, and would love to hear other input and maybe find someone to help us by writing a couple of skeletal sample applications for us.
There are so many people who are in this boat (based on my googling) that if this approach doesn't work I suggest we (or someone) set up a generic file delivery web server and generic file delivery Android service and make it available to developers for a very low cost.
You need to use the AssetManager.
That will give you can InputStream that you can copy to a FileOutputStream.
It all depends on what your goal is by doing this.
Are you trying to be nice to the user and conserve disk space on the device by moving files to the sdcard? Or do you merely want to ensure that these files are on the sd card?
If you just want to put the files on the sdcard then you should use the AssetManager as CaseyB mentioned
If you are trying to conserve phone memory then consider distributing the apk file without the 2 raw files, and then on first run download the files from a server that you have set up. This may cause a bit of a problem due to the time needed to download the files, but some users on devices with limited memory available on the device itself will be appreciative of it.