My expansion file is 200 Mb. I can't see it viable to pull files out of it in realtime (too slow for my purposes). So, I'm extracting all of them to regular files in other folder.
Now, I want to save some space on the card for my beloved user by avoiding app data duplication.
I have an idea to delete the actual expansion file and replace it with a zero size dummy, to fool Google Play and prevent it from downloading 200Mb again. Would that trick work?
I can't test for that as my app is not published yet.
I have no idea what kind of data they look at in order to redownload the expansion file, but if you don't want to use it as intended I think you'll have an easier time hosting your files and downloading them through your own download mechanism.
Related
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.
I'm looking to packing a large sqlite database with an android app, about 200-300MB. From what I've read, my options are putting it in the assets folder, and coping it out at runtime, resulting in duplicate data, or downloading the database from the web at runtime. I don't want to create a webserver for this app, so I was thinking of creating a seperate app that just installs the database to get around the data duplication problem.
All of those are pretty crummy, and I was wondering if there is a better solution?
First, I don't think you are allowed to put a 200-300MB database in your assets folder and distribute it as a single apk, since the hard limit for an apk file size is (as per google's documentation) 50 MB and I doubt that your db will compress that far.. Google introduced the "APK expansion files" for packaging large files with your apk. You can read all about those here: http://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion-files.html
I think (but I have no experience with expansion files myself) that this will not fix the issue you mentioned about having to deal with duplicate data because of the requirement to copy out your database file, but at least this will help you in the sense that you won't have to host your database file on your own webserver. I quickly scanned the documentation on the link I gave above and it clearly states that you should NOT throw away the expansion files when you are done with them, so no help on that part.
Of course, for the "setting up your own webserver part": I wouldn't even bother setting up my own webserver. There are plenty of parties out there that provide you some file hosting service. Probably you will have to pay for the bandwidth, but hey.. if people download your db file a lot, that also means that your app is doing well ;-)
I test of apk expansion files. I created a test app with a 100 MB sqlite database, uploaded the apk and database to the play store. I then downloaded the app onto the phone, the database was downloaded at the same time. The database was automatically renamed and placed in the publicly accessible directory:
/storage/sdcard0/Android/obb/com.example.app/main.1.com.example.app.obb
The app was able to open the database without any problems, but required external read and write permissions. The new and original database are bit for bit, the same. This appears to be the best solution for my use case.
A few issues, the new android developer console does not support uploading expansion files, so the old one needs to be used. Google only allows 2 expansion files, so that may be an issue for some use cases. Google say that you must not rename or delete the file, and that your app must be able to download the file from Google itself if it wasn't automatically installed.
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'm creating a simple Android App, it will be a map with a number of points marked on it. These points will sometimes change, based on an XML file hosted on the internet.
To reduce the initial load time my intention is to distribute a serialized List of these points with the application that can be updated in the future.
At first my intention was to distribute this serialized file as an 'asset'. This way I could just generate the file and drop it in to 'assets'. However, this does not work because (from what I can see) it is not possible for me to overwrite these assets.
The second option was to use the internal storage, however (from what I can see) I can't distribute this file as 'internal storage'.
Is my only option to distribute my serialized List as an asset and then on the initial load copy it to the internal storage? The files only going to be around 50kb but it seems unnecessary to have 2 copies of the same file (1 of which will eventually become outdated) as part of the same application.
How about always first checking the internal storage and if your data does not exist there read the 'asset' version.
Then you will have a syncronization job that will download the updated file (when available/updated) and put it in internal storage. But yes I guess you will be stuck with always having the original file there.