Android 15 remains to be months away, however one among its new options has just lately surfaced. Reportedly, customers will probably be in a position to archive an app to save house on their smartphone, as an alternative of utterly uninstalling it. This app archiving characteristic is at the moment out there in Google Play Store, for apps downloaded by {the marketplace}. However, there is no such thing as a guide management, and apps downloaded from different app marketplaces don’t help it. This is why an working system-level characteristic by way of Android 15 could possibly be far more helpful.
Spotted by Mishaal Rahman writing for Android Authority, the strings of codes for this characteristic have been found within the Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2 replace which was launched just lately. Rahman was in a position to discover “archive” and “restore” choices and activate them, permitting him to use the characteristic even when it was formally not added. He, then, tried to archive and restore an app and located that the characteristic robotically saved all of the person knowledge. Users will reportedly not have to check in or concern dropping any of the in-app knowledge by archiving them.
In his experiment, Rahman archived his Uber app, which occupied 387MB of storage. After archiving it, the app dimension was lowered to simply 17.64MB. A cloud icon additionally appeared on prime of the app icon. Clicking on the app once more started the downloading and putting in course of. Once it was put in, the cloud icon disappeared. Surprisingly, opening the app confirmed that his account was already logged in and all of the saved places have been additionally current.
This characteristic is at the moment out there within the Google Play Store and will be accessed by clicking on the profile icon > Settings > Automatically archive apps. However, as acknowledged above, this setting will archive hardly ever used apps which have been downloaded from Google’s app market. This will neither let customers manually archive an app nor does it help any apps downloaded from third-party sources.
Such a characteristic is beneficial when a smartphone is working on low storage and there’s a want to make pressing house to set up one other app or to seize high-definition photos or movies. Instead of uninstalling apps and going by the pains of reinstalling them and establishing their account (and dropping among the in-app knowledge), customers can merely archive some apps. Notably, (*15*)Apple already provides this characteristic in iPhone and it’s known as App offloading. However, this additionally works robotically and doesn’t give customers granular management to select which apps to archive.
