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androidsynchronizationgoogle-accountandroid-backup-service

What are the limitations of syncing data to Google Account?

Is there any downsides to using Google Account? Is there any limit?

Why ask this? It's because I played some android games for research and found out many of them don't save the user data just warning the users removing the games will remove whole data as well.

Ironically, all of them provided world rankings using Google Accounts. So, I became curious and wanted to get some opinions of experienced people if there is no problem for beginners like me to use Google Account for backing up data.

The data is going to be created with SQLite so I cannot let users save in their own SDCards. If Google Account is not good for saving data, I need to get an FTP server instead. (I'm not sure if I can deal with it well, though.)

But I really wanted to use Google Account, so was just about to start to study it.

Can I just use Google Account for user data? or better to get my own FTP server?

Solution

  • There is something that Google offers which is known as the Android Backup Service. It's precise use case is when you want to save user's data online. There are several advantages to this:-

    • Easy API to call Backup Service
    • No need to maintain a separate FTP server, hence reduced cost saving both domain and hosting charges.
    • Unlimited Backup space for your user's individual app installation.
    • In case the user deletes the app, your app's data can be retrieved from the Android Backup service.

    The developer page gives a fair amount of idea to anyone wanting to implement that kind of data backup support cost-effectively.