Book Image

Learning Android Application Development

By : Raimon Ràfols Montane, Laurence Dawson
Book Image

Learning Android Application Development

By: Raimon Ràfols Montane, Laurence Dawson

Overview of this book

The mobile app market is huge. But where do you start? And how you can deliver something that takes Google Play by storm? This guide is the perfect route into Android app development – while it’s easy for new apps to sink without a trace, we’ll give you the best chance of success with practical and actionable guidance that will unlock your creativity and help you put the principles of Android development into practice. From the fundamentals and getting your project started to publishing your app to a huge market of potential customers, follow this guide to become a confident, creative and reliable mobile developer. Get to grips with new components in Android 7 such as RecyclerView, and find out how to take advantage of automated testing, and, of course, much, much more. What are you waiting for? There’s never been a better time – or a better way – to get into Android app development.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Files


Shared preferences are the perfect solution if we want to store key-value sets of data, but if we want to store some complex data, it is not enough. In addition to shared preferences, Android allows us to read and write files in its file system. Depending on our needs, we can use internal or external storage. For information on file storage, check out http://developer.android.com/training/basics/data-storage/files.html.

Let's look at the differences between internal and external storage.

Internal storage

It is highly recommended that you save files in internal storage when these files need to be kept private from other applications. Moreover, Android guarantees that all the files saved in internal storage will be removed when the user uninstalls the application.

To create a file in internal storage, we need to get the base directory first. We can easily get it from the current context by calling the getFilesDir method. If we have to write a temporary file or, for example, an on-disk cache...