How can I view the shared preferences file using Android Studio?

JayUser picture JayUser · May 13, 2014 · Viewed 110.1k times · Source

I'm using shared preferences to store certain values for my app. I would like to see the file where the info is actually stored on my phone. I found many ways to do this on Eclipse, but I'm debugging on Android Studio. My phone is rooted. I read that having root access is important to read these types of files. If there is no way, then I will look up how to access the info through my program then output it to log cat. Hopefully, though, I can just view the file on the phone directly as it is much simpler. Thanks.

Answer

George Dima picture George Dima · Aug 30, 2014

From Android Studio , start Android Device Monitor, go to File Explorer, and browse "/data/data/< name of your package >/shared_prefs/". You will find the XML there... and also you can copy it for inspection.

If you have a non-rooted device it's not possible to do that directly from Android Studio. However, you can access the file with adb shell as long as your application is the debug version.

adb shell
run-as your.app.id
chmod 777 shared_prefs/your.app.id_preferences.xml
exit # return to default user
cp /data/data/your.app.id/shared_prefs/your.app.id_preferences.xml /sdcard

After that you can pull the file from /sdcard directory with adb.