A couple of weeks ago Google announced real-time editing of files for Google Drive. Today the Google Drive development team, have added another useful feature specifically targeted at developers. Google has introduced Application data folders which allow developers to securely store application specific content on a user’s Google Account, preventing any possibility of the user (or other applications) from modifying these files.
Once a User authorises the application to install on Google Drive, the application data folder is created and hidden from the user within Google Drive. Users have the ability to view how much data is being stored in that folder and can delete the folder at any time, although they cannot access the data stored within it. If the user uninstalls the application from Google Drive, the application data folder is deleted automatically.
Interested in creating an application to use this feature? Check out the Application Data File page on the Drive SDK website to see how to implement this feature.
What applications would you like to introduce application data folders?
Typo in the title. “Applcation”
Haha, Oops 🙂
This is awesome. Hopefully this will allow games to sync progress, or Pocket Casts to save downloads and sync between devices.
It means Pocket Casts doesn’t need user data to be hosted on privately run servers. The task can be given to Google Drive.
It means that other small scale app developers don’t have to deal with the headache of setting up and managing their own data servers. Google does it for them. That’s alot of freedom and will make future apps much more interesting.
And of course it’s crossplatform. Not just Android.
Persistent data storage across apps and devices? This is something Android needs, and it could potentially work better than iCloud which does similar for Apple. Very excited by this.
Certainly will be a great thing to implement for a lot of apps