Is there a way to persist application data between application installs and uninstalls in iOS

ios, ipad, iphone

Solution

You don't say how much data, but the following would be options:

- iCloud

- Keychain

- Dropbox

The only "universal" option, that all devices will have and that cannot be disabled, is the Keychain though you are limited by the amount of space you can use.

Personally, I would do nothing. If the user deletes the app I think it's fair game to have to recompute stuff on reinstallation.

Problem

I am developing an application that needs to perform expensive calculations at start up. So, the first time the application runs, the application do the calculations and store the result in a file. If the user decides to uninstall the application and to re-install it later, the calculations have to be done again and I would like to avoid to re-calculate. Notice that I am not talking about updates of the application but about uninstall / re-install. I was wondering if there is a way to persist data accessible only for my application but that can survive uninstalls. The solution can be inside the device (using kind of files / preferences / ...) or based in a server. For example, a possible solution could be to send the device id with the result to a server and to store it there, but as the device id has been deprecated in iOS 5, is not a valid solution anymore. Thank you for your answers. Jaime

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