Google’s working to give you more control over app data backups

By now, everyone using a smartphone should probably know that if they care at all about their personal data, they need to be backing it up somewhere off-device. Google already offers plenty of Android backup options, and we’ve recently been seeing those tools get even better, like with a smarter approach to backing up RAW photos. That trend continues today, as we uncover evidence for new, more granular controls for app backups.

When you back up your Android phone with Google, that includes data like your contacts, device settings, call and text history, and app data. But the problem is that not all that data is going to be equally useful, and some of it can take up a whole lot more space than other data. And if you’re approaching the storage ceiling of your Google One plan, that’s no good at all.

Looking through the new version 25.44.32 beta release of Google Play Services, we see developers working to implement individual per-app toggles letting you choose which software should be included in your backups.

These options aren’t yet visible in this release, but we’ve managed to take an early look at how they could work. Instead of seeing all your apps grouped together when configuring a backup, you’ll instead be able to see how much data each of them contributes to the total, and choose to include or exclude each app on its own.

Admittedly, the tiny amounts of data reflected in these screens is hardly worth thinking twice about, but if you’ve got one particular app that’s a shameless data hog, it might be worth singling it out for removal — and that’s especially true if you’re forced to back up your data over a mobile connection, when you’re also dealing with speed and data limits there.

It’s an idea that makes enough sense in theory, but we wonder just how many people backing up their phones will feel like going through all their apps and making decisions about their data, one by one. On the plus side, the list we’re seeing now is sorted by size, so you can just start at the top with your most data-intensive apps and maybe ignore the smaller ones.

For now, though, this is all still in development, so Google has plenty of time to tweak its approach further before it gets around to pushing any of this live. We’ll update you with news of any further work on it we’re able to uncover.