This year in late October Google launched officially the Developer Preview for Android 8.1 Oreo. Many minor alterations have been marked in the Android Open Source framework for 8.1 with respect to the current 8.0 release. Interestingly, these tweaks appear to be quite beneficial for the smartphone users with a lower storage capacity.
At XDA Developers, it has been found by the folks regarding the framework that it is designed in an intelligent manner. The applications on your phone, which are not in use and are inactive for a long time will get detected. After this detection, the inactive apps will be decreased in size, leaving space in the smartphone of the user. The inactiveness of an app will be decided by sysprop pm.dexopt.unopt_after_inactive_days, which is a field in the Operating System. This way the users will be able to use the memory of their smartphones occupied by inactive apps.
The running of the application via Android’s dexopt tool will ensure that the space of the device doesn’t get wasted.
Interestingly, the users do not use to take any extra effort in this work. The detection will be done automatically. Only, OEM’s are needed to enable this particular feature of inactive app detection for the device. Unfortunately, these OEM’s are not available for Android framework 8.0 and is only present for 8.1 Android Open Source framework.
This means Pixel and Nexus devices will be able to exploit this feature in about a month, but for other hardware to fit from it involves more time. It is better to wait and see how far it helps the users, only then one can sing the ballad of its advantages.