Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
long story short
- We managed to fully enable Android 15’s app archiving feature to get a better look at it.
- The feature is currently only available through the Play Store, but Android 15 will embed it into the operating system.
- This feature automatically archives apps you don’t use to free up space.
Today’s flagship phones have enough storage space to easily accommodate hundreds of Android apps, photos, videos, and other files. However, many people don’t buy high-end phones, and even those who do usually end up buying basic models with less storage. Uninstalling rarely used apps can free up a lot of space, but can cause trouble when you need to reinstall and reset them. Fortunately, this won’t be too much of an issue in Android 15, as you’ll be able to archive apps you don’t use instead of uninstalling them.
Back in early 2022, Google launched an app archiving feature that they said would allow users to reclaim about 60% of the storage space occupied by apps. This is achieved by “removing part of the application rather than completely uninstalling it.” This feature takes advantage of the delimited nature of the Android App Bundle format used by Google Play to distribute applications. When a developer builds an Android App Bundle and submits it to Google Play, Google’s developer tools generate an additional APK installation file called an “Archived APK”.
What exactly is an archived APK?
An archived APK is just a stripped-down version of the base app that is installed when Google Play archives the app. The archived APK is very small, as it only contains the original app’s icon (with the download logo overlaid on top) and code to let Google Play restore the original app when the icon is clicked. Since the archived APK has the same signature as the original app, it can be installed on top of the original app without clearing any data.
App archiving currently exists as a feature of the Google Play Store, rather than a feature of Android itself. This means you can’t archive or restore apps from Android settings. This also means that other Android app stores must build their own implementation of UI and application archiving. In contrast, app uninstall functionality in iOS is embedded directly into the operating system’s built-in settings menu.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Open the application archive in Google Play. Source: Google.
When I dug into the Android 14 QPR2 beta last month, I found some signs that Google was working on adding OS-level support for app archiving. I even managed to get the Archive and Restore buttons to appear in the Settings app. However, after making more modifications to the latest Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2 build, I was able to fully enable Android’s built-in app archiving feature.
How will app archives work in Android 15?
In the video embedded below, I first open the Uber app on my Google Pixel 8 Pro to show that I’ve set it up and logged in with my account. Then I opened Uber’s app information page and it showed that it took up 387MB of storage space. I then clicked the “Archive” button to overwrite the Uber app with the archived APK (the resulting app size is not shown in the video, but it was reduced to 17.64MB, a reduction of about 95.4%). Finally, I clicked on the Uber app’s home screen icon (clicking “Restore” in the app’s information page would also work) and waited for Google Play to download and install the original app again. Once completed, I launched the Uber app to show that I was still logged into my account and that none of my data was lost in the process.
Android’s version of built-in app archiving not only lets you manually archive apps, but also lets you choose whether to have the operating system automatically archive apps you don’t use often. If you toggle “Manage unused apps” in an app’s app information page, the operating system will remove permissions, delete temporary files, stop notifications, and eventually archive the app if it hasn’t been used for a while.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Android 15 can automatically archive apps you don’t use often.
Although I’ve demonstrated Android’s app archiving feature working with Google Play, there’s nothing stopping it from working with other Android app stores. Other Android app stores only need to support the Android App Bundle format and be able to handle the android.intent.action.UNARCHIVE_PACKAGE intent sent by the operating system when the user clicks the archived app’s icon or the Restore button in settings. The operating system sends the UNARCHIVE_PACKAGE intent to the application’s “record installer”, which in this case happens to be the Google Play Store.
Hopefully more Android app stores will add support for app archiving, as Google is building it into the operating system. Speaking of which, while I was able to activate this feature in the latest Android 14 QPR beta, Google likely won’t roll it out until Android 15. This is because quarterly platform releases tend to never introduce breaking changes that could impact app developers, and this is a feature that will impact app store developers.