Understanding and using the DataStore library

In this section, we will discuss how we can persist key-value pairs of data and how we can use the DataStore library for this. In Android, we have the possibility of persisting primitives and strings in key-value pairs. In the past, this was done through the SharedPreferences class, which was part of the Android framework. The keys and values would ultimately be saved inside an XML file on the device. Because this deals with I/O operations, it evolved over time to give the possibility to save data asynchronously and to keep an in-memory cache for quick access to data. There were, however, some inconsistencies with this, especially when the SharedPreferences object was initialized. DataStore is designed to address these issues because it's integrated with coroutines and flows.

To add DataStore to a project, we will need the following dependency:

dependencies {
    …
    implementation...