November 28/2022
Earlier this year, Google gave a statement that it will soon launch a new feature called app archiving support. A few months after this statement, today Google has finally rolled it out, which will be available in Google Play Store update v33.4, which will be launched on Thursday.
March 08/2022
With a post published on its blog dedicated to developers, Google has announced important news coming to Android in the near future. The Californian company is working on a new feature that will allow you to free up to 60% of the storage space occupied by the apps, a real godsend for those who are always struggling with space problems.
App storage
According to Google, one of the main reasons why users remove applications from their smartphones is related to space problems in the internal memory. There are many applications that take up a few GB and, especially for applications that are used sporadically, the only viable solution is to uninstall.
However, things are about to change, because Google is working on the possibility of archiving applications that are not used, but which could still be used in the future, allowing you to free up to 60% of the occupied space without having to delete them from the device. In this way the application remains in memory, keeping the user’s data and settings, and can be easily updated to the latest version if necessary.
Google will shortly release Bundletool version 1.10, which will allow developers to prepare for archiving using the App Bundles feature. The apps that will be created with Android Gradle Plugin 7.3 will use a new type of APK, much smaller, capable of preserving essential information, ready to be recovered when the app is reactivated.
While we will start creating archived APKs now, they won’t be functional until the archiving functionality is launched to consumers later in the year.
The new feature will be released during the year and it is easy to imagine that the debut could take place with the stable version of Android 13, of which the first Developer Preview was released in recent days. Developers will still have the option not to use this feature, although Google emphasizes its importance in keeping its user base stable.