What is the use of Shared Preferences in Android? [closed]

Question

I am just wondering, what is the use of shared preferences in Android. Please some one clear my doubt.

EDIT

Can I use them for the purpose like Showing the setup screen for the first time, and setting some flags, so that the setup screen/activity won't be shown after it is completed(on next startup of app)?

Answer 1

Think of a situation where you wanna save a small value (a flag probably) that you wanna refer later sometime when user launches the application. Then shared preference comes into action.

You may ask, why we can do it using sqlite too right? But the problem of sqlite is that it’ll want you to write lengthy codes and supporting classes. Shared Preference let you read and write key value pair in couple of lines easily. But always remember, shared preference is not a solution for you to keep complex relational data.

Answer 2

You can use SharedPreferences to save any primitive data: booleans, floats, ints, longs, and strings. This data will persist across user sessions (even if your application is killed).

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