Clear Cache in Android Application programmatically

Kotlin has an one-liner

context.cacheDir.deleteRecursively()

The answer from dhams is correct (after having been edited several times), but as the many edits of the code shows, it is difficult to write correct and robust code for deleting a directory (with sub-dirs) yourself. So I strongly suggest using Apache Commons IO, or some other API that does this for you:

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

...

// Delete local cache dir (ignoring any errors):
FileUtils.deleteQuietly(context.getCacheDir());

PS: Also delete the directory returned by context.getExternalCacheDir() if you use that.

To be able to use Apache Commons IO, add this to your build.gradle file, in the dependencies part:

compile 'commons-io:commons-io:2.4'

If you are looking for delete cache of your own application then simply delete your cache directory and its all done !

public static void deleteCache(Context context) {
    try {
        File dir = context.getCacheDir();
        deleteDir(dir);
    } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace();}
}

public static boolean deleteDir(File dir) {
    if (dir != null && dir.isDirectory()) {
        String[] children = dir.list();
        for (int i = 0; i < children.length; i++) {
            boolean success = deleteDir(new File(dir, children[i]));
            if (!success) {
                return false;
            }
        }
        return dir.delete();
    } else if(dir!= null && dir.isFile()) {
        return dir.delete();
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

Tags:

Android