The Android platform provides a variety of formats for us to store user data, from the basic name/value pairs and user preferences that we discussed in Chapter 1, Activities, to fully fledged SQLite 3 databases that can be used to store any data we want in an organized fashion.
A smart phone or tablet will come equipped with internal memory and this is often the ideal place to record and maintain our application data. Android provides classes and interfaces to handle data that will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Java.
Along with this generally small internal storage space, the system, more often than not, provides external memory in the form of at least one removable SD card which is also available to us as developers.
Perhaps the most powerful data tool available to the Android developer is the inclusion of SQLite 3 and the system exposes all the methods we might need to administer such databases.
In addition to generating data, we can also control how (or even if) it is...