Freeing up 60% of storage for apps

Posted by Lidia Gaymond and Vicki Amin, Product Managers at Google Play

One of many essential causes customers uninstall apps is to unlock house. To stop pointless uninstalls and assist customers get extra out of their units, we began engaged on a brand new characteristic that might allow app archiving.

Archiving is a brand new performance that can permit customers to reclaim ~60% of app storage quickly by eradicating components of the app quite than uninstalling it fully. An archived app will stay on the gadget and may simply be restored to the most recent accessible suitable model, while preserving the person knowledge.

With the discharge of the upcoming model of Bundletool 1.10, we’re taking step one towards making archiving accessible to all builders utilizing App Bundles. For apps constructed with the Android Gradle Plugin 7.3, we’ll begin producing a brand new sort of APK – archived APKs. Archived APKs are very small APKs that protect person knowledge till the app is restored. Whereas we’ll begin creating archived APKs now, they received’t be useful till the archiving performance is launched to customers later within the yr.

As soon as launched, archiving will ship nice advantages to each customers and builders. As a substitute of uninstalling an app, customers would be capable of “archive” it – unlock house quickly and be capable of re-activate the app rapidly and simply. Builders can profit from fewer uninstalls and considerably decrease friction to choose again up with their favorite apps.

As earlier than, all APKs generated will probably be accessible to obtain and examine via Generated APKs API or in Play Console underneath App Bundle Explorer. For the reason that performance is open source, builders will be capable of examine the code, and different app shops can profit from it too.

If you wish to opt-out of the technology of archived APKs, you’ll be able to modify the construct.gradle file of the mission:

android {
    bundle {
        storeArchive {
            allow = false
        }
    }
}

Alternatively, if you’re not utilizing Gradle to construct your apps, you’ll be able to opt-out with a brand new choice within the BundleConfig:

{
  "optimizations": {
    "storeArchive": {
      "enabled": false
    }
  }
}

Maintain an eye fixed out for extra details about app archiving on the Android Builders weblog.