Android: How to get a file's creation date?

Question

The file creation date is not an available, but you can get the last-modified date:

File file = new File(filePath);
Date lastModDate = new Date(file.lastModified());

System.out.println("File last modified @ : "+ lastModDate.toString());

Here's how I would do it

// Used to examplify deletion of files more than 1 month old
// Note the L that tells the compiler to interpret the number as a Long
final int MAXFILEAGE = 2678400000L; // 1 month in milliseconds

// Get file handle to the directory. In this case the application files dir
File dir = new File(getFilesDir().toString());

// Obtain list of files in the directory. 
// listFiles() returns a list of File objects to each file found.
File[] files = dir.listFiles();

// Loop through all files
for (File f : files ) {

   // Get the last modified date. Milliseconds since 1970
   Long lastmodified = f.lastModified();

   // Do stuff here to deal with the file.. 
   // For instance delete files older than 1 month
   if(lastmodified+MAXFILEAGE<System.currentTimeMillis()) {
      f.delete();
   }
}

The file creation date is not an available piece of data exposed by the Java File class. I recommend you rethink what you are doing and change your plan so you will not need it.

Starting in API level 26, you can do this:

File file = ...;
BasicFileAttributes attr = Files.readAttributes(file.toPath(), BasicFileAttributes.class);
long createdAt = attr.creationTime().toMillis();