Secure Storage — Gotchas & Best Practices

Critical Platform Pitfalls

⚠️ Android: Auto Backup Breaks Encrypted Values

Auto Backup restores encrypted preferences to a new device where the encryption key is invalid — this throws unrecoverable exceptions. You must either disable Auto Backup or exclude secure storage files from backup. See references/secure-storage-api.md for setup options.

⚠️ Android: Always Wrap in try/catch

Corrupted values from backup restoration throw exceptions. Never call GetAsync unprotected:

// ❌ Unprotected — crashes on corrupted backup data
var value = await SecureStorage.Default.GetAsync("key");

// ✅ Protected — handles corruption gracefully
try
{