Android 15 extends ‘app archiving’ to F-Droid third-party app store

Android 15 will extend the ‘app archiving’ feature to F-Droid. The popular app store is the first third-party platform to support the new capability.

Google relaxes rules about app archiving

The Android Operating System (OS) has been powering devices for several years. The OS existed when storage space was expensive and scarce. Hence, Google added several tricks to manage storage space.

One of the easiest methods to reclaim storage space on an Android device is uninstalling apps. However, it is cumbersome to keep installing, removing, and reinstalling apps. To address this issue, Android allows archiving apps.

Archiving an app allows users to reclaim storage space by deleting the app’s installation files. More importantly, archiving preserves user data. This allows users to quickly start reusing apps that Android has archived.

Interestingly, for most of the Android versions, Google had restricted app archiving. Android wouldn’t even let users archive an app if it was from a third-party app store. In other words, app archiving would only work on apps that were downloaded and installed from the Google Play Store.

F-Droid is the first third-party app store to support the ‘app archiving’ feature

Starting with Android 15, Google has relaxed the rule for app archiving. This means Android 15 will allow third-party app stores access to the app archiving feature.

Torsten Grote, one of F-Droid’s maintainers, reportedly submitted a patch that adds experimental support for Android 15’s app archiving feature. F-Droid’s latest stable version should include this patch and access to app archiving.

Archiving and un-archiving an app installed from F-Droid should work the same way it does for apps downloaded from the Google Play Store. Simply put, end-users might not notice anything nor do they have to take any action.

Moving forward, Android 15 will send and execute the app archiving instructions to the F-Droid app store. F-Droid, in turn, will be able to accept, understand, and handle these instructions, and restore apps that Android 15 has archived.

For several years, apps from third-party app stores didn’t have the same capabilities and system access privileges compared to Play Store apps. Google may have relaxed some restrictions, presumably due to mounting regulatory pressure.