Google Play to copy Nextbit Robin with app archiving to intelligently save your storage space

Way, way back in the day (a la 2016), a very special phone that was before its time hit the market. It was called the Nextbit Robin, and its hook was that it was marketed as a device that managed its own storage on your behalf so you would never run out of space. By automatically archiving backed-up photos as well as apps that you haven’t used for a while, you’d technically not need to concern yourself with the internal storage as often as a traditional phone.

Sadly, the phone never caught on with consumers the way it could have, and since then, Google has baked many of these intelligent features directly into Google Photos and its other apps like Files. One thing that was never truly seen again though was smart archiving of applications that hadn’t been opened in some time. That’s all changing with this upcoming app archiving feature that’s baked into Google Play services. It’s not been rolled out yet and has been spoken about for over a year, but here it is in action thanks to Assemble Debug on Twitter.

At this time, it only works with the Google News app, but in due time, we expect it to work with any and all apps you have installed on your device. In my opinion, the idea seems to be that apps that are out of sight are out of mind. App archiving seeks to keep experiences present and at your fingertips so that you feel ownership over them without them taking up space. I suppose it’s more like your own personal Google Play Store than anything else.

The app still takes the same amount of time to reinstall once you tap it from the home screen or app launcher and you’re left waiting during that process. I hope that one day all apps become PWAs or that installing these experiences becomes a lot quicker so that it feels seamless.

Unlike the Nextbit Robin’s Smart Storage feature where you simply tap an app on the home screen and a progress bar appears under the greyed-out icon before it pops back in as a colored image, you can open and use, Google Play will take over your screen and force you to watch the install process. In every way, this seems like a step back from what a smaller company offered years prior, but I’m sure it will improve over time. It’s obvious that Google was inspired by Nextbit with this, but it is what it is.