Android Log System

There are basically three logs on the system:

Log:

• For short, textual data
• In-memory ringbuffer, fast
• Ephemeral (you'll lose it on a crash, or the ringbuffer scrolls)
• IntendedApp developers

EventLog is:

• For short, binary data
• In-memory ringbuffer, fast
• Ephemeral (you'll lose it on a crash, or the ringbuffer scrolls)
• IntendedPlatform developersTo collect statistics

Dropbox:

• For long text or binary data
• Persistent, written to disk
• Kinda slow (Disk)
• Meant for platform developers too, mostly to collect crashes & large statistics
• Subject to limits, deleted by Tag if a tag's count and/or size get too large

Dropbox is what we used during development to capture all the strictmode violations in gingerbread.

You can use Dropbox for one-off debugging, but it's not really recommended. it's definitely not recommended as a way to share data between apps. it's not reliable enough, and you can't put permissions on the data. you shoshould just use a shared userid and use the normal filesystem with appropriate permissions.