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Is there any downsides to using Google Account? Is there any limit?

Why ask this? It's because I played some android games for research and found out many of them don't save the user data just warning the users removing the games will remove whole data as well.

Ironically, all of them provided world rankings using Google Accounts. So, I became curious and wanted to get some opinions of experienced people if there is no problem for beginners like me to use Google Account for backing up data.

The data is going to be created with SQLite so I cannot let users save in their own SDCards. If Google Account is not good for saving data, I need to get an FTP server instead. (I'm not sure if I can deal with it well, though.)

But I really wanted to use Google Account, so was just about to start to study it.

Can I just use Google Account for user data? or better to get my own FTP server?

Eric Aya
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Jenix
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    are you familiar with this https://developer.android.com/distribute/engage/game-services.html? "Leaderboards are a fun way to drive competition among your players." more: https://developers.google.com/games/services/android/leaderboards – pskink Aug 22 '15 at 18:44
  • Thanks pskink, but that was what I was talking about.. Many games were using just those service but not Android Backup Service. I thought some limitations or reasons were there. Thanks for the link anyways, I'll have a look in it. – Jenix Aug 23 '15 at 12:15
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    so, i dont understand what you really need, read this https://developers.google.com/games/services/common/concepts/leaderboards, isn't it what you really want? – pskink Aug 23 '15 at 12:20
  • Sorry, my writing wasn't clear enough. I want to use Android Backup Service which was explained by Boggartfly below. I asked this question because of some games which provide just game services such as leaderboards. I know Leaderboards and Backup Service are totally different things, but those all require user's login anyhow. If so, I thought there's no reason not to support backup service too. User data in games is important as much as leaderboards. So I couldn't understand those games and guessed there maybe some limitations. – Jenix Aug 23 '15 at 13:14

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There is something that Google offers which is known as the Android Backup Service. It's precise use case is when you want to save user's data online. There are several advantages to this:-

  • Easy API to call Backup Service
  • No need to maintain a separate FTP server, hence reduced cost saving both domain and hosting charges.
  • Unlimited Backup space for your user's individual app installation.
  • In case the user deletes the app, your app's data can be retrieved from the Android Backup service.

The developer page gives a fair amount of idea to anyone wanting to implement that kind of data backup support cost-effectively.

Parth Sane
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    Thanks! It seems there's no reason to avoid using Android Backup Service. They were just lazy to put the service? I don't understand.. – Jenix Aug 23 '15 at 12:10