how can I programmatically remove the image from a folder “Drawable”?

Question

I am developing an E-commerce application. Here I need to show lots of product images when the app is up. I have stored few product images in the drawable folder to reduce the network usage. I am planning to download delta product images when the new product is added in my back end product inventory and save it in SQLite database.

In the app I have to refer two different path ( drawable and SQLite database) to get all product images.

So how can I move the initial fish images in drawable folder to SQLite database at the time of APK generation OR after the app installation (in onCreate method of my MainActivity). And I also need to delete those initial images in the drawable folder after moving it to SQLite database.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The bottom line is that if you deliver with content bound into your APK, it will remain there. Assuming you're planning on distributing through the Google Play store, the only way to modify this via an app update, which is obviously extremely hacky. So if your goal is to discard initial drawable resources, you cannot do this.

My advice is to compress the images as much as possible and only provide one image size which you can resize at runtime, so use the nodpi drawable resource folder (ie drawable-nodpi)

The alternative is to download the images via network. Though you say you don't want to do that the file sizes can be made quite small and so the download fast in most cases, so unless you're sure network connectivity will be a problem for your users it's a viable option.