Android 12 may let you hibernate unused apps to free up space
It may be hard to believe, but we’re likely only a little over a month away from the release of the first Android 12 Developer Preview. After all, the first Android 11 Developer Preview was released back in February of 2020! We’ve been scouring the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit for hints of new features coming to the next version of Android, and recently we’ve spotted evidence that Google is working on an app hibernation feature for Android 12.
Based on a couple of code changes submitted to AOSP, Google is adding a new app hibernation system service “that manages app hibernation state, a state apps can enter that means they are not being actively used and can be optimized for storage.”
Unfortunately, we don’t have any more details about this feature. For example, we don’t know how apps can enter this state. Is it automatically determined based on app usage statistics? Can users manually choose to force apps to hibernate? We also don’t know how apps will be optimized for storage, nor do we know how the OS will tell the user which apps have been hibernated.
Our guess is that app hibernation will be automatic like the auto-revoking permissions feature introduced in Android 11 and that optimization involves compression of the APK and other app resources, but we won’t know for sure until more code changes are submitted. We also don’t know for sure if this feature will actually make its way to Android 12 as the commits haven’t been merged yet. There’s still time for new features like this to be added, but the window is closing soon. Once we learn more about this app hibernation service or any other features coming to Android 12, we’ll share that information.
