Downloading Multiple Files Simultaneously In Android Applications

I'm writing an application for Android which let users browse a list of files and download them. For every download, I created a thread and I download the file with an HttpURLConne

Solution 1:

Alas, i don't know of a way to throttle certain connections. However, a practical approach would be to implement a queue of downloads to control the number of simultaneous downloads. In your case, you would probably want to only let 1 thing download at a time. This can be implemented a few different ways.

Here's a way to do it with Handlers and a Looper: http://mindtherobot.com/blog/159/android-guts-intro-to-loopers-and-handlers/

Edit 1: See mice's comment. It may be smarter to have a max of 2 threads downloading at a time.

Solution 2:

You might want to check out the DownloadManager class in the android SDK.. Its only available above or equal api level 2.3 though.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/DownloadManager.html

Some tutorials you might want to see..

http://jaxenter.com/downloading-files-in-android.1-35572.html

http://www.vogella.de/blog/2011/06/14/android-downloadmanager-example/