My app has several image and media files, which are around 1MB each or so. So if i follow the normal way, the app size is crossing over 40MB, which is huge. Is there anyway to avoid this?
I have heard of external storage, but i really don't get any clue of how to work on them!
Do i need to ask all those who instal this to save the images and media files in the external disk and then the app uses those? This makes my files public..isn't it?
I actually don't own a android device. So is it like, whenever people install an app from the market, does it ask if it has to install in the phone memory or the external memory?
I really need your help.
If there is a way, i'd be thankful if you can provide me the step by step details of how this can be done!
Thanks a lot..
Regards
Nithin
There is, from the little I know of this, a slight security risk from putting files onto the SD card. I don't think I personally would worry too much about that since most people that would want access to the files in your apk (Which does not include your source code) could get it regardless without too much trouble.
As of Android 2.2 the user has the option to move an app to their SD card, but only if the developer explicitly tells the app to allow it. I'm fairly sure this only applies to 2.2+ devices though, so being that you are likely going for a larger audience than that it isn't an end-all solution. I am only really pointing this out in case you do end up putting one large file on the market. If so, be sure to allow the transfer to SD card, your app will stay on devices much longer.
Downloading the files online from within the app and saving them out to the SD card would be a good solution, though I am not sure how end users feel about downloading a small app then having to download a very large package before using it. In the end they will have to download it either way, so it is up to you whether you want to ask them to do it up front in the market or afterwards via the app. If you do want to try to download all the content then maybe the code example in this link will help you figure it out :
http://androidsnips.blogspot.com/2010/08/download-from-internet-and-save-to-sd.html
You might consider streaming the files or downloading them inside the application to the sdcard. Speaking from experience my users have had problems downloading apps as big as 30MB. Some phones also have a severely limited internal memory, which is where the applications are downloaded to.
Related
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'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 writing an application that needs to store some data,and picture. For example place's information. this information don't need to change very often. and
I have seen that databases are
stored under /data/data/package_name/databases
I decided to store my data under /data/data/package_name/files.
With the emulator i can see all these files (databases)
under the proposed directories but moving the application on a real
device and installing a file system browser i cannot see any file
under /data. i know that there are some security constrain in (not-rooted) device. However, are there any suggestion about the solution.. where can i store these data and how? because i'm quite new to android. Thanks so much for your help.
The reason you can't see it on the device is basically just as you said; the device isn't rooted, so other apps don't have access to the /data folder.
This is okay though, because you can still store your files there. Your app has access to anything under /data/data/package_name/, you just won't be able to see it in a file browser unless you root. This is normally a good thing, to keep average users from mucking around with your databases/files.
Read up more on storage methods here.
I have 11 videos to include in my App. Each of them is around 9MB. Besides those, I have to a few sound files and image files in the app. Therefore the app size is going 100+MB. Is there any way to accommodate all the files so that app size does not become an issue for me?
Download the files after starting the app for the first time.
Puh..that's quite large. In such a situation I'd
Let the user download your app not containing any videos/audio files that cause the large size
At first run guide the user through a wizard where you download the additionally needed files to the SD card.
Still, downloading nearly 100MB won't be ideal, but better than directly download all of it at the first install. (IMHO)
The most common sollution i've seen is downloading them during the first run of the programme. Just check if everything is available, and if it isn't, download the needed files.
pros:
This way you can also add video's on the fly.
APK size stays small so initial download is quick
Cons:
after downloading the app you can't directly use it: content must be downloaded first
I would suggest you to put them in the assets folder, so they will not be compressed.
This way you'll have problems testing your project with eclipse, so try building it with command line, and then install on device with adb
In my scenario, I had 300+ videos, totalling upto 400+ MB of the size.
I checked with few of them and deployed the app the way i just told.
may not be the best way around, but may work.
You can upload into youtube or make your own simple video streaming server
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.