Data sharing between two applications

Question

Recently i had an interview in which the question was asked as "How would you be able to share the data between two installed apps or apk's?"

I didn't have any answer for this question. Can anyone help me in determining an way to do so...

Answer 1

Send data from Application 1 (for ex:Application 1 package name is "com.sharedpref1" ).

SharedPreferences prefs = getSharedPreferences("demopref",                     Context.MODE_PRIVATE);             SharedPreferences.Editor editor = prefs.edit();             editor.putString("demostring", strShareValue);             editor.commit(); 

Receive the data in Application 2( to get data from Shared Preferences in Application 1).

    try {             con = createPackageContext("com.sharedpref1", 0);//first app package name is "com.sharedpref1"             SharedPreferences pref = con.getSharedPreferences(                         "demopref", Context.MODE_PRIVATE);             String your_data = pref.getString("demostring", "No Value");         }      catch (NameNotFoundException e) {                 Log.e("Not data shared", e.toString());          } 

In both application manifest files add same shared user id & label,

 android:sharedUserId="any string"   android:sharedUserLabel="@string/any_string" 

both are same... and shared user label must from string.xml

like this example.

<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.example.xxxx" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0" android:sharedUserId="any string"  android:sharedUserLabel="@string/any_string"> 

Answer 2

ContentProviders are a good approach to share data between applications.