Managing and Organizing Preferences

Abstract

Like many other SDKs, Android supports preferences. Generally speaking, it tracks preferences for users of an application as well as the application itself. For example, a user of Microsoft Outlook might set a preference to view e-mail messages a certain way, and Microsoft Outlook itself has some default preferences that are configurable by users. But even though Android theoretically tracks preferences for both users and the application, it does not differentiate between the two. The reason for this is that Android applications run on a device that is generally not shared among several users; people don’t share cell phones. So Android refers to preferences with the term application preferences, which encompasses both the user’s preferences and the application’s default preferences.