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Assets provide a way to include arbitrary files like text, xml, fonts, music, and video in your application. If you try to include these files as "resources", Android will process them into its resource system and you will not be able to get the raw data.
res and assets directory both can keep assets like images. In res/drawable, we can keep the images. 2. In assets, we can create our own folder, like image, video, textFile etc and can keep more than one assets accordingly.
The raw (res/raw) folder is one of the most important folders and it plays a very important role during the development of android projects in android studio. The raw folder in Android is used to keep mp3, mp4, sfb files, etc. The raw folder is created inside the res folder: main/res/raw.
Select app/main folder, Right click and select New => Folder => Asset Folder. It will create 'assets' directory in main.
The main differences between the raw folder and the assets folder.
Since raw is a subfolder of Resources (res), Android will
automatically generate an ID for any file located inside it. This
ID is then stored in the R class that will act as a reference to
a file, meaning it can be easily accessed from other Android classes
and methods and even in Android XML files. Using the automatically
generated ID is the fastest way to have access to a file in Android.
The assets folder is an “appendix” directory. The R class does
not generate IDs for the files placed there, which is less compatible
with some Android classes and methods. File access in the assets folder is slower since you will need to get a handle to it
based on a String. However some operations are more easily done by
placing files in this folder, like copying a database file to the
system’s memory. There’s no (easy) way to create an Android XML
reference to files inside the Assets folder.
From the Android documentation, the raw/ directory is used for:
Arbitrary files to save in their raw form. To open these resources with a raw InputStream, call Resources.openRawResource() with the resource ID, which is R.raw.filename.
However, if you need access to original file names and file hierarchy, you might consider saving some resources in the
assets/directory (instead of res/raw/). Files in assets/ are not given a resource ID, so you can read them only using AssetManager.
In one line, the files in the raw/ directory are not compiled by the platform, are assigned a resource ID and cannot be grouped into sub-folders whereas if you want the otherwise use the assets/ directory.
Adding to the answers given above...
/res/strings,/res/layout,/res/xml files etc all gets compiled into binary format. But if you place files, including XML files, in the /res/raw/ directory instead, they don’t get compiled into binary format.
One big advantage of using assets over raw resources is the
file:///android_asset/Uri prefix.This is useful for loading an asset into a WebView. For example, for accessing an asset located in assets/foo/index.html within your project, you can callloadUrl("file:///android_asset/foo/index.html")loading that HTML into the WebView.
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