When users interact with apps, they generate data. It’s this data that apps usually require to save or access to function properly and offer the best user experience possible. This data includes personalized settings including media, as well as other documents. The data can be used to track clicks and purchases made within the application. There are many ways to obtain this data that include asking the user to provide it, determining it based on their behavior on the web or buying it from a third party. Ideal customer data should be centrally stored and in a standardised format that permits easy integration and exchange between different applications. There are currently developing customer profile standards by industry to aid in defining the data model to use to accomplish this.

There are many ways to store data, and the system used by an application will affect the way the user interface looks. The most common is file storage, where the data is stored as folders and files that are arranged in an order. This is the approach used by hard disk drives as well as cloud-based storage services, like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Another method is block storage, in which the data is divided into blocks that can be accessed from any location on the storage infrastructure, with identifiers to allow them be quickly found and actioned.

Early systems included tools which provided detailed information about the properties and characteristics of storage media in a textual form. Modern systems, like Android, offer visualizations to support these functions, notably i loved this capacity/usage as well as lifespan. The visualizations of capacity/usage are typically displayed as horizontal bar charts, while the duration is shown with a circular pie chart or its variants like doughnut charts.