Data Storage Best Practices with Jetpack
Article Summary
Florina Muntenescu and Rohit Sathyanarayana from Google reveal why SharedPreferences has been secretly blocking your UI thread and causing ANRs. Their solution? Jetpack DataStore, a complete reimagining of Android data storage.
The Android team introduces DataStore, a Kotlin coroutines and Flow-based replacement for SharedPreferences. The article breaks down two implementations (Proto and Preferences), compares them against legacy options, and provides migration guidance for existing apps.
Key Takeaways
- SharedPreferences blocks UI thread on fsync(), triggering ANRs at every service/activity lifecycle event
- Proto DataStore offers strongly typed schemas via Protocol Buffers with atomic transactions
- Built-in SharedPreferences migration runs automatically before any DataStore data access occurs
- All operations run on Dispatchers.IO with Flow-based async API eliminating UI blocking
Critical Insight
DataStore replaces SharedPreferences with a fully asynchronous, type-safe storage solution that eliminates UI thread blocking and provides transactional data consistency.
