Anyone who owns a smartphone is probably familiar with the tiresome problem of storage space. It doesn’t matter whether you take a lot of photos, have installed several games from the Playstore or save a lot of music on the device: After a certain time, the memory of your smartphone is full to the brim.
Apple is aware of this problem and has therefore offered a feature since iOS 11 from 2017 that allows you to archive rarely used apps to save storage space. Your personal data from the archived app will remain stored on your device, but all other content will be deleted and can be downloaded again if necessary.
Now Google is finally following suit and will offer a similar feature for Android devices in the future. Developers can now add it to their apps.
How Auto-Archive works
The new feature is mainly used in the Play Store.
If you want to download an app from the Playstore in the future, but your smartphone does not have enough storage space, a dialog box will open as shown in the picture above, with which you can automatically archive rarely used apps.
Your Android smartphone will first archive the apps that you haven’t used for a long time. Auto-archiving temporarily erases up to 60 percent of an app’s storage from your device.
Apps that support auto-archiving are marked with a small cloud icon with an arrow pointing down in the middle:
You can recognize automatically archived apps with a special symbol.
Lack of memory could also be remedied in other ways
If smartphone manufacturers were to increasingly install Micro SD card slots again, such a feature would not be as necessary as it is currently.
However, Google doesn’t just follow Apple when it comes to auto-archiving. An important security feature is coming soon for Android. Storage of user data: Google follows Apple’s account deletion policy.
What do you think of the auto-archive feature? Does the feature really help with possible storage space problems? And do you think that manufacturers like Samsung, Google or Sony should install SD card slots more often again? Feel free to write your opinion in the comments.
