SharedPreferences and Thread Safety

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Processes and Threads are different. The SharedPreferences implementation in Android is thread-safe but not process-safe. Normally your app will run all in the same process, but it’s possible for you to configure it in the AndroidManifest.xml so, say, the service runs in a separate process than, say, the activity.

To verify the thready safety, see the ContextImpl.java’s SharedPreferenceImpl from AOSP. Note there’s a synchronized wherever you’d expect there to be one.

private static final class SharedPreferencesImpl implements SharedPreferences {
...
    public String getString(String key, String defValue) {
        synchronized (this) {
            String v = (String)mMap.get(key);
            return v != null ? v : defValue;
        }
   }
...
    public final class EditorImpl implements Editor {
        public Editor putString(String key, String value) {
            synchronized (this) {
                mModified.put(key, value);
                return this;
            }
        }
    ...
    }
}

However for your case of the unique id it seems you’d still want a synchronized as you don’t want it to change between the get and the put.

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