Google to bring App Hibernation feature with Android 12

It's been a little over five months since Google released the Android 11 and the OS is steadily making its way to millions of phones around the world. Now, the company has shifted focus to the next major update Android 12 for 2021.

Folks at XDA Developers Forum have chanced upon new source codes submitted to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). They are understood to be related to Android 12 and the software experts have found a new feature App Hibernation Service.

"System service that manages app hibernation state, a state apps can enter that means they are not being actively used and can be optimized for storage. The actual policy for determining if an app should hibernate is managed by PermissionController code"-- reads the feature description.

The App Hibernation feature will certainly help reduce the power consumption by the unused apps running in the background and extend the battery life of the device. Also, by clearing space, users will get extra storage to install new apps on the phone.

However, it remains to be seen how the phone would decide which apps need to push to hibernation. We believe, Android 12 may bring an option for users to manually switch on the feature for particular applications, or automatically decide on a dormant app, which hasn't been used for a week/month/year or longer to sleep and reduce app's size.

We will get to know of the App Hibernation feature in a month or two when Google releases the Android 12 preview for developers before the public version released in the second half of 2021.

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