Users create data when they interact with apps. Apps often need to access or save this data in order to function properly and to provide the best user experience. This data includes personalized settings as well as media and other documents. It can also be used to track clicks, purchases and my blog other conversions within the application. The data can be gathered in several ways, including by asking the user, inferring it from their online behavior, or by purchasing it from an outside. Ideally customer data is centrally located and saved in a standard format to facilitate integration and exchange between applications. There are currently developing customer profiles that are standardized by industry sector to aid in defining the data model to be used to accomplish this.
There are a variety of ways to store data, and the system used by an application will impact how the user interface appears. The most commonly used is the storage of files, in which the data is kept in folders and files, arranged in an order. This is the approach used by hard disk drives as well as cloud-based storage such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Another method is block storage, in which the data is split into blocks that can be stored anywhere on the storage infrastructure, with identifiers that allow them to be quickly found and actioned.
Early systems offered built-in tools that report specific information on the properties of the storage medium in a textual format. Modern systems, like Android provide visualisations of these functions, such as capacity/usage as well as lifetime. Capacity/usage visualisations are generally horizontally stacked bar charts. Lifespan charts are typically displayed as a circular pie graph, or its variants like doughnut charts.
