Handling full disk storage in Android

Question

This question has evolved a bit from the initial one, here's a short info:

I filled up the disk storage on the emulator and got it absolutely useless - the process android.process.acore is displaying the "... has stopped unexpectedly" dialog in a loop, so nothing can be done on the system. I can't even turn it off with the power button on the right (it's tried to power off for 10 minutes now, logcat is full of exceptions). Great it's an emulator, I wonder what would happen if it was my real device..

Maybe someone can elaborate on the reasons for this behavior - should it be like this?

Here's the initial question, please also refer to my edits:

I'm curious about handling a random situation such as running out of disk storage on an Android device.

I looked over the examples on developer.android.com and I see they don't even bother to do exception handling.

I can see that when it comes to SQLite classes, there are a couple of exceptions, such as SQLiteOutOfMemoryException, but I can't find any information when and how to handle these scenarios.

Does anyone have experience with:

• bulletproofing an app for such an edgy situation
• ways to test this on an emulator
• feedback from frustrated users (maybe heard of any frustration with the example-apps or even core apps..?)

Thanks in advance for your time guys.

[Edit]

I also run into this bite on Android issue tracker:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1653

It's kind of mysterious.. and seems it's a ghost since 2008.

[Edit2]

Alrite, with the advice from the comments: I just did a test using:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=file

with parameters bs and count chosen to fit the remaining space,

and filled the /data partition.

How amazed I am that Google Maps just crashed on the SQLiteFullException. Actually all the apps crash - even Phone.

Is it true that nobody handles those exceptions? Is it ok that those applications just get killed with the "..has stopped unexpectedly"?

Answer 1

The way I handle this is with error handling around all file operations so that the app won't just crash, and I do a file stat (https://stackoverflow.com/a/5083482/1317564) on the directory being used by the user to ensure there's enough free space. If not, I show them a nice big error message. ;) Generally the phone itself will do plenty of complaining as well, so they should notice the problem sooner or later.