The subject matter described herein relates to a file system with adaptive flushing for an electronic device. The file system keeps data in memory much longer and its policy for flushing in-memory write cache to storage is application-aware and adaptive. More specifically, what parts of the cached data are ready for flushing could be determined according to the access characteristic of an application. In addition, when to do flushing can be selected flexibly at least partly based on user input interactions with an application of the electronic device or with the electronic device. Further, a multi-priority scheduling mechanism for scheduling data units that are ready to be flushed could be employed, which ensures fairness among applications and further improves flushing performance.