- The Google Play Store added an app archiving feature last year that automatically archives apps you don’t use often to free up storage space.
- App archiving is currently only supported within the Google Play Store, and you can’t manually archive an app.
- Code within the latest Android beta suggests that Google could bake app archiving support right into the OS.
I’d wager that many of you have at least some Android apps installed that you rarely use but can’t bring yourself to uninstall because it’d be a hassle to set them up again. These apps could eat up hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes of your precious storage space, which poses a problem if you’re low on storage. If you have an iPhone, you can use the app offloading feature in iOS to uninstall the app without deleting your app data. Google Play offers a similar feature on Android devices called app archiving, but unlike on iOS, it isn’t baked into the OS. That could change in Android 15, though, as Google is working on baking its app archiving features right into the OS.
For a bit of context, Google first announced its app archiving feature back in early 2022 with the promise that it would let users reclaim approximately 60% of the storage space taken up by an app by “removing parts of the app rather than uninstalling it completely.” The way app archiving works under the hood is quite clever. Whenever developers opt-in to this feature, the tool that takes their Android App Bundle submission to generate the APK installation files then creates an additional APK called an “archived APK.” This archived APK is a heavily stripped-down version of the app that is pushed to devices whenever an app is archived; its sole purpose is to add a home screen icon that users can tap to trigger Google Play to unarchive the app.