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It feels like Android 11 has only been out for five minutes, but news about the next major release is about to arrive quickly. If last year’s schedule is anything to follow, we could get the first Android 12 developer preview as early as next month. We’ve heard a little bit of information about this so far – Android Runtime is set to become a Project Mainline add-on, and it will be easier to use alternative app stores – but this latest news looks particularly intriguing.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a bunch of unused apps on your phone that you will definitely use someday … maybe. We’ve been saying this for months, but we’re about to send them back any day maybe. As long as we don’t use them, they just take up space on our phones. According to a pair of Gerrit entries from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that XDA developers have been informed about, Android 12 may introduce a feature that will allow these dormant apps to enter a state of hibernation.

The changes to the AOSP code suggest that Google is working on a new system service that will put inactive apps into deep sleep, which would also optimize storage.

A system service that manages the hibernation state of applications, a state that applications can enter means that they are not actively used and can be optimized for storage. The actual policy for determining whether an application should hibernate is handled by the PermissionController code.

It’s unclear exactly what will determine that an app can be hibernated. This can happen automatically when an app has not been used for a while or it can be a manual setting so you can choose to put an app to sleep until you have to. new need. Maybe both scenarios will be possible. The Android 12 Developer Preview might arrive too soon for this to be included in any working form, but it’s an interesting prospect that we’ll likely hear more about in the coming months.


Mishaal rahman, Android’s upcoming app hibernation feature will work differently depending on whether it is enabled for a single user or for all users. If only one user on a multi-user device, the app cache of that specific user will be cleared.

A todo referenced in the code tells us that the next step will be to support hibernation at the package level which will affect all users, although it is not clear how this will differ. It is possible that all app data will be erased and / or the app itself may actually be removed from the device, to be reinstalled when the user disables hibernation. What all of this will look like on the front-end is still a mystery too, so wait for more details as we get them.