Backing Up Your WhatsPackt Messages

In any chat application, data handling is a significant concern – we need to ensure that messages sent and received are stored correctly, quickly retrieved when needed, and resilient to potential losses due to unforeseen circumstances such as device failures or accidental deletions. This requires a robust data persistence strategy. We also need to consider performance and user experience, which calls for effective caching mechanisms, as well as making sure that we have backups in the event of data loss or when the user changes devices.

In this chapter, we will start by introducing you to Room, a persistence library that provides an abstraction layer over SQLite and makes it easier to work with databases in Android. You’ll learn about its architecture and components and how to use it to store and retrieve chat conversations and messages.

Next, we will tackle the creation of a cache mechanism orchestrating the use of Room locally...