Loading Images from Application Data Directory Vs. Assets Directory on Titanium Mobile Android

While working on lists with images on an application, I noticed something weird: loading images  that I cached (created a copy on the local application directory) sometimes fails and blank views are instead shown on the screen.

At first I thought that the downloader is causing the memory leak since I don't set it to null after downloading the images. However, after setting it null (and the other objects I use for copying the file), nothing changed and still the views become blank after some use. After a lot of searching and trying different ways to load the images, I found out that when I load images from the assets directory, they do not disappear.

So to verify if my observation is correct, I performed a test. I created two separate windows with the same UI layout and objects, but one window is loading from the assets directory and one would load from the application data directory. Here is the comparison of the two views:

The picture on the left is the list loading images from the application data directory and the one on the right loads images from the assets directory. As you can see, some of the images on the left picture disappear after the list is scrolled several times.

In titanium all files under the resources directory are stored in the assets folder. So if the images you need to display will be used for a long time or is a permanent part of the application, I would suggest that you place it in the assets directory. If you need to display cached images, it would be better if you use the WebView just like what I previously did.

Full source code for my test application can be downloaded from here.