This story was originally published and last updated .

It feels like Android 11 is only five minutes out yet, but the news about the next major release will be coming thick and fast soon. If there’s something going on with last year, we can get the first preview of Android 12 for developers as early as next month. We’ve heard a few little things about it so far – Android Runtime is going to be a Project Mainline module and it’s going to be easier to use alternative app stores – but this latest news sounds particularly intriguing.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of unused apps on your phone that you’ll definitely use one day … maybe. We’ve been saying this for months, but we’re probably going to shoot it up any day now. Until we get it ready to use, they just take up space on our phones. According to some Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit entries put forward by XDA developers, Android 12 could introduce a feature that enables dormant apps to go into hibernation.

The changes in the AOSP code indicate that Google is working on a new system service that will put idle applications into a deep sleep, which also enables optimal storage.

System service that manages the sleep state of the app, can enter a state application, which means that it is not actively used and that it can be optimized for storage. The actual policy for determining whether an app should hibernate is governed by the PermissionController code.

It is not clear what exactly will determine that an app can be put into hibernation. This can happen automatically if an app has not been used for a certain amount of time, or it can be a manual setting so you can choose to sleep an app until you need it again. Perhaps both scenarios are possible. The Android 12 developer preview may be too early to include in any functional form, but it’s an interesting prospect we’ll probably hear more about in the coming months.


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

An action referred to in the code tells us that the next step will be to support hibernation at package level which will affect all users, although it is unclear how this will differ. It is possible that all the information of the app will be cleared and / or that the app itself will be removed from the device and can be reinstalled when the user disables hibernation. What it will all look like up front is also still a mystery, so feel free to stay tuned for more details.