Android : How to read file in bytes?

The easiest solution today is to used Apache common io :

http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-release/org/apache/commons/io/FileUtils.html#readFileToByteArray(java.io.File)

byte bytes[] = FileUtils.readFileToByteArray(photoFile)

The only drawback is to add this dependency in your build.gradle app :

implementation 'commons-io:commons-io:2.5'

+ 1562 Methods count

here it's a simple:

File file = new File(path);
int size = (int) file.length();
byte[] bytes = new byte[size];
try {
    BufferedInputStream buf = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
    buf.read(bytes, 0, bytes.length);
    buf.close();
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Add permission in manifest.xml:

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />

Since the accepted BufferedInputStream#read isn't guaranteed to read everything, rather than keeping track of the buffer sizes myself, I used this approach:

    byte bytes[] = new byte[(int) file.length()];
    BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
    DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(bis);
    dis.readFully(bytes);

Blocks until a full read is complete, and doesn't require extra imports.