I can’t say whether I respect and are kind to the user, or if I unnecessarily find it difficult to use the utility of my application in the name of handling the phone, like a porcelain doll.
I have a successful application in the Android Market. One of the main functions is that it records sports statistics from the game, which the user scores. The current level of detail is pretty simple: a line for each player and a field for each base stat. However, I could, apparently, significantly increase the details and usefulness of the application if I wrote down additional information by blowing it into many relational tables and, possibly, thousands and thousands of records.
My question is: is this a responsible thing? Until now, I have shied away from this, thinking that “it's just a phone” and “it's just SQLite,” but I never looked to see if this is a legitimate reason to hold back on what I would do. “Don't think about doing it.” in a web or desktop application.
So, how much data (very quantitative, I know), is it reasonable to expect what the phone app will do in relation to storing and sifting records in the database?
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not just talking about adding more fields, as I know that the effect of this is trivial. I'm talking about moving from the level of detail "This player has 5 singles and 3 homers" to store information about each pitch, which consisted of each on a bat, which led to 5 singles and three homers. Obviously, this will require additional tables and possibly a large number of records.
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