Google's mission: giving you more control over your app data backups
Data privacy and control are essential in today's digital world. With Google's latest efforts, you're about to gain even more power over your app data backups. But here's where it gets controversial: should you really have to micromanage every app's data? Let's dive in and explore this intriguing development.
Android backups have long supported saving app data, but the catch was that you couldn't choose which apps to back up individually. Google is now working on changing that, introducing per-app toggles that let you decide which apps get backed up and which are excluded.
The new feature presents a list of apps sorted by data size, allowing you to prioritize the biggest data users. This is especially useful if you're approaching your storage limits on Google One.
By examining the beta release of Google Play Services version 25.44.32, we've discovered developers working on implementing these individual app toggles. While the feature isn't visible yet, we've gotten a sneak peek at how it might work.
Instead of seeing all your apps grouped together during backup configuration, you'll be able to see the data contribution of each app individually. This means you can choose to include or exclude each app based on its data usage.
While the data amounts shown in the screenshots might not seem significant, if you have an app that's a notorious data hog, it might be worth excluding it, especially if you're backing up over a mobile connection with limited speed and data.
The idea makes sense in theory, but will people really want to go through their apps one by one and make decisions about their data? On the bright side, the list is sorted by size, so you can start with the biggest data users and ignore the smaller ones.
For now, this feature is still in development, giving Google time to refine its approach before rolling it out. We'll keep you updated on any further progress.
And this is the part most people miss: an APK teardown, like the one we've done here, helps predict future features based on work-in-progress code. But there's no guarantee these predicted features will make it to a public release. So, stay tuned, and let us know your thoughts on this potential new feature in the comments!
