According to a new report by XDA Developers, Google is working on the feature that will offer a solution for storage issue. The Android latest update will allow a feature to free up your phone’s space by making application inactive of it’s not been used and reduce its cache sizes in a device. However, it comes with a catch here. The feature will not come with OTA and smartphone manufacturers will have to manually enable it.
How will Android reduce size of inactive apps?
The new feature is explained in a commit from October 31 in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). According to the commit, the feature will get activated automatically when a smartphone is running low on storage. Then after a specified time, the feature will mark apps that haven’t been used in a while as inactive, and will downgrade their size by removing the cache files. Thus these “Inactive” marked apps won’t use that much storage space. On the other hand, it will consider those apps that have recently been used as “active” even if even it is in background being used by any other app. So, users should note that it will not be a complete solution for your storage issues since active apps still take a considerable amount of space. These days only flagship or premium device come with a 64GB or 12GB storage options. While for mid-range and budget devices that usually come with 32GB or even 16GB, maintaining the amount of storage is a concern. For such users, this feature will certainly ease storage related concerns. However, it may be a while before this feature becomes available to most users. Even if your manufacturer decides to use the new feature, it will take a while before finally coming to your device. This will ship with Android 8.1 Oreo update and most OEMs are still not even on Android 8.0. Google on the other hand has released Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview 1 for developers.
