Mishal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- F-Droid is adding support for Android 15’s App Archive feature, becoming the first third-party app store to support this new feature.
- App archiving is a feature that lets you reclaim storage space by deleting installation files without deleting app data.
- The Google Play Store already supports app archiving, but Google opened it up to third-party app stores by making it a system-level feature in Android 15.
If your phone is low on space, an easy way to free up storage space on Android is to uninstall some apps. However, it’s a pain to uninstall apps you might need later, so it’s a good idea to archive them. Archiving an app lets you delete the app’s installation files and reclaim storage space without deleting user data, but on Android you can archive an app unless the app store that originally installed the app can restore the app. I can’t even do that. Android 15 will allow third-party app stores to support app archiving, and it looks like F-Droid will be the first to take advantage of this new feature.
If you’re new to F-Droid, it’s one of the best places to download third-party apps without using the Google Play Store. F-Droid offers a number of open source apps that don’t charge a dime, each lovingly created by independent software developers. F-Droid doesn’t have everything that many consider to be the best Android apps available today, but you’ll find plenty of hidden gems that aren’t available on Google Play.
F-Droid itself is an open source project and relies on contributions from a small number of developers. Torsten Grote, one of the maintainers of F-Droid, recently submitted a patch that adds experimental support for Android 15’s app archive feature. This patch was merged last week and will be included in the upcoming 1.22 release.
Archiving and unarchiving apps installed by F-Droid on Android 15 works exactly the same as in the Google Play Store. All F-Droid needed to do to support this feature was add code to handle the intent that Android 15 sends when you tap an archived app’s icon. This intent requests the recorded app’s installer (F-Droid in this case) to restore the app.
In version 1.22, F-Droid will be able to handle this intent, allowing you to restore archived apps on Android 15. F-Droid primarily distributes apps in APK format, but that shouldn’t be a problem as an archive for Android 15 apps. This feature works with all Android app formats.
It’s nice to see third-party app stores like F-Droid adopt these new features announced by Google, as it feels like a more suitable Google Play alternative. For years, third-party app stores lacked many of the same features that Google Play offers, but in response to increasing regulatory pressure, Google has added new APIs to Android that fill the gap. Ta. These include APIs to install app updates without user confirmation in Android 12, APIs to take ownership of app updates in Android 14, and APIs to archive and unarchive apps in Android 15. . And we don’t just publish your app archives to third-party app stores. In Android 15, Google opened this feature to third-party launchers, allowing apps like Niagara Launcher to support app archiving.
