Data Storage on Phone is excessively high.

GlennP · 12-15-2024 11:39 PM

Hi.

Some of my colleagues are experiencing Data Storage issues on mobile phones. Some have over 30 GB of data in appsheet, screen shot below, while ahving only 1 of our apps installed.

This makes no sense to me for the following reasons;

We have 5 apps within our business, all running off of the one database (Google Sheets). Each app has security filters, only allowing in certain rows from each of the tables that app uses. But here is the bit that does not make sense to me. The entire Google Drive we are using to host the data has under 26GB, in total. That includes thousands of images, and thousands of PDFs and other documents, none of which would be loaded into the app installed on the phone from which the screen shot below was taken.

The user cleared the Appsheet data, which removed our app, and reinstalled our app a week ago today, and again it has crept up to over 30GB again.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Aurelien

Hi @GlennP

For all of your 5 apps, can you check this option is disabled?

GlennP

Hi @Aurelien .
Thanks for your reply. After posting the above I did some testing. Store content for offline use was indeed enabled on some of the apps, but there is still something I don't understand.

I did some testing on this on my own phone. For a longer period of time my phone was showing Appsheet Data of 1.47 GB.

I left an app which had this feature was enabled open for a period of time, and got the download bar to just over 2000 of 9556.

Then I closed the app, and checked the App Data for Appsheet. It had increased from 1.47GB to 5.5GB.

I then reopened the same App, and the download bar again started at 0 of 9556. I let it reach just over 1000 of 9556, and closed the app again, and checked the App Data for Appsheet again. This time it had increased from 5.5 GB to 7.7 GB.

So it seems as if the app is downloading the same data over and over, to different memory in the phone. This might explain how the data in my colleagues phone is 30+ GB, when the total data in our Google Drive is only 25GB, and that app would not have access to all of that 25GB.

It seems that appsheet is not reclaiming the data already downloaded to the phone, but downloading it again?

Aurelien

Hi @GlennP

The behavior your noticed is normal as the whole content is downloading at every syncing despite any update made.

I agree this is something that could be fixed by the AppSheet dev team.

About this:

@GlennP wrote:

So it seems as if the app is downloading the same data over and over, to different memory in the phone

This should not happen.

But if your storage reaches 30Gb and equals the sum of all of your data, then it's OK from my perspective.

GlennP

Thanks @Aurelien . However, it exceeds the sum of all our data, by a significant amount.

@Steve can you offer any insights here?

Steve

I see two possible issues:

1) You allow the app to run off-line. To run off-line, the app must have all the media the app itself references stored on the device. If you don't need the app runnable off-line, disable off-line support. If off-line use is allowed, the app must update the copies stored on the device when the app is on-line, hence the download indicator.

2) The app should only be downloading media referenced by the data loaded into the app. Make sure your security filters are filtering out rows that contain Image, File, Drawing, Signature, and Thumbnail columns the app shouldn't have local copies of.

GlennP

@Steve I understand everything you are saying, but it still does not explain why the data in the mobile app exceeds by a significant amount the total data size of our entire Google Drive.

Is @Aurelien right that it could be a bug?

Steve

It's certainly possible.

Aurelien

@GlennP wrote:

However, it exceeds the sum of all our data, by a significant amount.

It looks like a bug to me then. You may want to issue a ticket here: https://support.google.com/appsheet/gethelp

GlennP

@Aurelien thank you for your input on this.