How is my Android phone's inbuilt SMS app so fast?

Question

I am making an Android SMS app. I used ContentResolver with URL = content://sms/inbox to read all SMSs from inbox.

But still my app takes a significant amount of time to load all the messages whenever I start the app on my physical device(which has 1000s of SMS).

On the other hand, my phone's inbuilt SMS app shows all messages as soon as I start the app. How does the inbuilt SMS app achieve that?

Answer 1

IMHO,

They don't read all messages. You can do query with grouping by sender with unique keyword if required. That will give you the list about 100-200 entries. That is enough for first screen. Optionally, after that you request for 5 most recent senders messages to preload them to speed up read access. And then, on selecting sender you load ONLY senders messages (may be even just last 50).

Based on this URL: https://developer.android.com/reference/kotlin/android/content/ContentResolver You have parameters "QUERY_SORT_DIRECTION_DESCENDING, QUERY_ARG_LIMIT, QUERY_ARG_SQL_GROUP_BY" which can help you find unique senders. Also you may consider to utilize different provider like ContentProvider.

UPDATE: I can only give you example how to do it in SQL. Something like:

select * from inbox GROUP BY sender.

Will give you the list of senders.

Furthermore, you can save the list in you data and update it periodically.