Tips for filling up storage on mobile devices?

Questions
#1

Hi all,

We recently had someone ask what would happen if our mobile app tried to sync from our web app, but in the middle of the sync ran out of storage. I know this is an extremely unlikely scenario, especially since the data we sync is < 10 MB maximum, but now our higher-ups are obsessed with figuring this out.

First, has anyone done a test like this before? If so, what can I expect to happen? Hopefully no catastrophic failures?

Second, how can I easily fill up all the storage space? We’re using both iPad and Android. Smallest iPad and Android each have 32GB.

Thanks a bunch!

  • Nicholas
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#2

Try to fill device memory with some other files until there is only few megabytes of free space, then trigger sync. Depending on app code, most likely scenarios are that either sync will fail or app will crash. Developers should have covered sync fail so that when it happens it fails gracefully (it’s more likely to happen due to network fail than memory, so it should be covered).

Not exactly your scenario, but another example why testing memory usage is important: Recently we had a project for one client where we needed to redesign and improve app that someone else made for them. App had awful memory leaks - 9MB app would fill 1.5GB of RAM memory after one hour of use, and it works just with text. This caused app to crash on older devices that do not have enough RAM memory (for example iPhone 6S). After fixing those bugs, app now uses around 50MB of RAM after 1h of use and there are no more crashes.

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