what is a good way to handle very very large amount of data in Android?

Question

I'm currently working on an Android application that requires reading from call history and text history. And for further analysis, I've extracted these the huge amount of entries from the corresponding content provider, created and inserted all of them to a SQLite database.

But the problem I've encountered is when this is running on a phone that has been used for years (meaning there's an enormous amount of data generated from calls and texts), the retrieval process and database building process takes too much time and may even cause the app to crash. Even if i tried to put these process in a AsyncTask, the problem still exists. So my question is:

Am i doing it in a good way to just put any time consuming operations away from Main UI, OR What's a better way, if any, to handle very very large amount of data in Android?

Answer 1

Use pagination logic. Fetch only the most recent and relevant data and load older data if the user requests it.

Answer 2

Call history on most android phones is limited to 500 entries CallLog.Calls , while SMS provider has not such limits, you can query the count of the tables and limit your queries to 50 at a time and pass it to a separate thread for processing. Also make sure you run this in a background service with low priority so as to not disturb any other operations ongoing in the device.