Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Do that Back Up Thing

One thing I really hate is when I play through most of a game, and then something happens where I either update my device's OS or have to reset it to factory settings and ALL of my game progress is lost. This can be easily prevented, and is not only applicable to games! Any app that has user specific data should be utilizing the Android Backup Service APIs to allow a user to have their information backed up to the cloud.

While most devices support some backup service, it's not guaranteed to be Google's backup service. However, you only need to register for Google's service. If some devices uses a different service they will have all the framework for it done internally. Also, you do not need to do anything special for devices that do not support any backup service, as your BackupAgent will just never be run on those devices.