Have you ever struggled with storage space on your Android device? For individuals who have, we bet that downloading applications that you ultimately don’t end up using very often is a major culprit here. To help you clear up storage space on your device, Android will receive an auto-archiving feature that can save you significant amounts of storage space by archiving your unused applications.

The feature is not available just yet, but once it becomes available, individuals can enable it to automatically archive applications, resulting in an estimated reduction of storage space by about 60%. This is pretty huge; the app’s data will remain on your device’s storage, but the application itself will have to be re-installed to the device from the Play Store when you need to use it again.

This is a notable feature in that manually uninstalling an application from your device will actually delete all data associated with the app from your device, meaning that it would be lost for good. Of course, uninstalling apps that you don’t use in the slightest is a good practice, but for apps that are used infrequently, archiving is a welcome alternative.

The main goal of introducing such a feature to Android users is really for the developers’ sake, too. By enabling archiving for apps, this feature essentially gives users the ability to reduce the negative impacts of installing too many apps and having to uninstall them. This also helps developers, too, in that it reduces the likelihood that individuals will choose to manually uninstall their apps and cease using them altogether.

Whenever an individual wants to install a new app and the system finds the user is running out of storage, Google will ask if the user wants to archive infrequently used applications. It’s an interesting solution to a problem that is more common than you might think.

Of course, there are other options for shoring up your data storage issues, like cloud storage and SD cards. But for those who don’t have these options immediately available to them, this is a solid alternative.

Will you take advantage of this feature on your Android device?