In the last chapter,  we touched on important topics, such as the use of third party libraries, Android application testing, and how to run background tasks on the Android platform. In this chapter, we will focus on the storage of data. Over the course of this book, we have stored persistent application data at different instances when necessary. So far, we have made use of SharedPreferences to cater to all our data storage needs. This is by no means the only option for data storage the Android application framework provides. In this chapter, we will take an in-depth look at the means of data storage available to us on Android. In the process of doing this, we will learn about the following:

• Internal storage
• External storage
• Network storage
• SQLite databases
• Content providers

In addition, we will identify which storage method is best for various use cases. Let's start the chapter off by learning about internal storage.