What is Android's file system? [closed]

Answer 1

Most answers here are pretty old.

In the past when un managed nand was the most popular storage technology, yaffs2 was the most common file system. This days there are few devices using un-managed nand, and those still in use are slowly migrating to ubifs.

Today most common storage is emmc (managed nand), for such devices ext4 is far more popular, but, this file system is slowly clears its way for f2fs (flash friendly fs).

Edit: f2fs will probably won't make it as the common fs for flash devices (including android)

Answer 2

Johan is close - it depends on the hardware manufacturer. For example, Samsung Galaxy S phones uses Samsung RFS (proprietary). However, the Nexus S (also made by Samsung) with Android 2.3 uses Ext4 (presumably because Google told them to - the Nexus S is the current Google experience phone). Many community developers have also started moving to Ext4 because of this shift.

Answer 3

Depends on what hardware/platform you use.

Since Android uses the Linux-kernel at this level, it is more or less possible to use whatever filesystem the Linux-kernel supports.

But since most phones use some kind of nand flash, it is safe to assume that they use YAFFS.

But please note that if some vendor wants to sell a Android netbook (with a harddrive), they could use ext3 or something like that.