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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T16:31:26+00:00

I’m doing an android application much like the gmail app for android. I can

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I’m doing an android application much like the gmail app for android. I can see the app is very fast and very responsive.

I’m sure gmail uses local caching for better performance. But I wonder how does gmail does the following use cases.

Lets say i login for first time and the app loads all email and put in sql lite or any other caching.
use case1
every time i delete or add a star it makes an asyncronous server req to server. this is fine.

use case 2.
how does the app get notified in case the user makes changes from another client. (from a browser).
To download the entire mails will be costly. Lets assume a case in which the user adds a star to a already cached email.

How can we implement the api in such a way that to get only updates which made from other clients. Updates like new email, deleted email, star added, etc. I’m considering the scenario when the user doesn’t use the background sync.

This is been bothering me for a long time. Request you guys to let me know some tutorials or links to understand the secret behind the gmail app.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why don’t you look at the gmail web app. That will be using the same/similar design principals (gmail web app is also very fast for me). Then you can apply the same principals. With the web app you can look at the web requests using something like firebug with firefox. Under the Net tab it will show the json of what is being sent across the network. It will also show you the way the request was structured. You wont be able to see how they go about optimally returning the data, but that should be fairly trivial.

    I would recommend for returning data that you do the following:

    1) create a cache for the most recent page of emails.
    2) Updates of new emails will be immediately prefetched into the cache.
    3) setup a cache for the next page and previous page of emails.

    Essentially what I am saying is:

    1) You can look at googles web version which is very visible to plain snooping.
    2) You can optimize based on statistical usage of how the user would want to see their emails. This can suggest cache improvements.

    What you are asking for in terms of links is harder because your question relates to many general concepts and proriatary software.

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