Google has announced its testing a feature that will allow you to “archive” unnecessary apps in order to save up space on your device. The news was published on its Android Developer’s Blog, and on it, the Tech Giant adds that any app that supports the feature will allow users to partially uninstall it, “by removing parts of the app rather than uninstalling it completely”.
Google says “App Archiving” is done by creating a new sort of APK (Android Package) — often known as the “guts” of an app that allows it to work properly on your device — that it refers to as archived APKs. Archived APKs, as the Software company points out, are far less in size and save all of your data until you restore it, thereby restoring it to its original size.
The feature will be made available to developers with the release of Bundletool 1.10, but it will not be usable until the company makes it available to the general public “later in the year,”.
Google says developers can opt-out of archived APKs. According to the blog post, “Since the functionality is open source, developers will be able to inspect the code, and other app stores can benefit from it too.” To do this, the company says, you can modify the build.gradle file of the project:
Google didn’t discuss how the incoming feature will appear on Android. Who knows – maybe it could show along with the uninstall option when users long-press the app’s icon?
However, archived APKs appear to be a good option for anyone who has a backlog of rarely used apps but isn’t ready to delete them yet. When you’re not connected to Wi-Fi, backing up your apps and then restoring them should take significantly less time and use far less mobile data than reinstalling them.
