How do IOS applications store mass amounts of data?

Question

I know that there is Core Data to store information onto your phone, but what if you are making a social media application such as Instagram. Where did they manage to store all the information for every user? My main question is when there is a large amount of data to be stored for an application where do application designers store this information? Thanks

Answer 1

The data is stored on their servers in the form of a database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

When the application needs to retrieve some of the user's information such as likes, photos etc... a HTTP Request is made to the server to request the data from the database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http_request#Request_message

PHP and MySQL are standard and low-end languages and databases to use and quite easy to learn and become familiar with. More advanced databases tend to use caching layers and other types of layers over the database which prevent data loss, increase read and write speeds, cache the request data, and more. Furthermore, other companies may chose to use NoSQL databases.

There is a comparison between NoSQL and SQL databases here: http://metadata-standards.org/Document-library/Documents-by-number/WG2-N1501-N1550/WG2_N1537_SQL_Standard_and_NoSQL_Databases%202011-05.pdf

There is a comparison chart in more detail that can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems

One the data has been requested and delivered onto your iOS Device, it can be manipulated to be stored in many different ways.

Core Data and SQLite are the generally used methods of storing the data as they derive from eachother and it is quite familiar to the majority of SQL databases in terms of the schema.

Answer 2

You can use coredata to store the data. Images can be stored in document folder.