Introducing Tiny Storage: a small, lightweight UserDefaults replacement

Following my last blog post about difficulties surrounding UserDefaults and edge cases that lead to data loss (give it a read if you haven’t, it’s an important precursor to this post!), I wanted to build something small and lightweight that would serve to fix the issues I was encountering with UserDefaults and thus TinyStorage was born! It’s open source so you can use it in your projects too if would like.

As mentioned in that blog post, UserDefaults has more and more issues as of late with returning nil data when the device is locked and iOS “prelaunches” your app, leaving me honestly sort of unable to trust what UserDefaults returns. Combined with an API that doesn’t really do a great job of surfacing whether it’s available, you can quite easily find yourself in a situation with difficult to track down bugs and data loss. This library seeks to address that fundamentally by not encrypting the backing file, allowing more reliable access to your saved data (if less secure, so don’t store sensitive data), with some niceties sprinkled on top.

This means it’s great for preferences and collections of data like bird species the user likes, but not for sensitive details. Do not store passwords/keys/tokens/secrets/diary entries/grammy’s spaghetti recipe, anything that could be considered sensitive user information, as it’s not encrypted on the disk. But don’t use UserDefaults for sensitive details either as UserDefaults data is still fully decrypted when the device is locked so long as the user has unlocked the device once after reboot. Instead use Keychain for sensitive data.

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