I'm a linux user and one think I hate is that every application
creates it's own directory directly under my home directory. There is
a freedesktop specification which describes where application data
should be stored:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

So now I'm realizing the same thing with my Android device. Every app
creates it's own application directory directly under /sdcard/
But if you take a look in the android developer documentation you find
the section "data-storage":
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html

Under the heading "Accessing files on external storage" you can find
the following statement:
>> You should then write your data in the following directory:
>> /Android/data/<package_name>/files/
>> The <package_name> is your Java-style package name, such as 
>> "com.example.android.app". If the user's device is running API Level 8
>> or greater and they uninstall your application, this directory and all its 
>> contents will be deleted.

It's great that Android provides the method getExternalFilesDir() to
create this directory, but there is one problem with this definition.
Why will this directory be deleted if the user uninstall the
application?

I opened a few Bug/Feature Request for some applications (which
provided an issue tracker) to use this directory. But nobody will
implement this because the directory will be deleted during the
uninstall process?!
There are some apps which advise to uninstall and reinstall the app
when there are specific problems. Then all my data will be deleted? So
this specification is useless, because nobody use it :-(

I think the directory should not be delete! What do you think? What
should an app developer do to avoid the clutter on the sdcard root
direcotry?


~ Bernd

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