Difference between Preference commit and apply

Apply:

Commit your preferences changes back from this Editor to the SharedPreferences object it is editing. This atomically performs the requested modifications, replacing whatever is currently in the SharedPreferences.

Note that when two editors are modifying preferences at the same time, the last one to call apply wins.

Unlike commit(), which writes its preferences out to persistent storage synchronously, apply() commits its changes to the in-memory SharedPreferences immediately but starts an asynchronous commit to disk and you won't be notified of any failures. If another editor on this SharedPreferences does a regular commit() while a apply() is still outstanding, the commit() will block until all async commits are completed as well as the commit itself.

As SharedPreferences instances are singletons within a process, it's safe to replace any instance of commit() with apply() if you were already ignoring the return value.

You don't need to worry about Android component lifecycles and their interaction with apply() writing to disk. The framework makes sure in-flight disk writes from apply() complete before switching states.

The SharedPreferences.Editor interface isn't expected to be implemented directly. However, if you previously did implement it and are now getting errors about missing apply(), you can simply call commit() from apply().

Commit:

Commit your preferences changes back from this Editor to the SharedPreferences object it is editing. This atomically performs the requested modifications, replacing whatever is currently in the SharedPreferences.

Note that when two editors are modifying preferences at the same time, the last one to call commit wins.

If you don't care about the return value and you're using this from your application's main thread, consider using apply() instead.

Returns
Returns true if the new values were successfully written to persistent storage.