More concrete asked: does /e/ delete any configuration data or even the complete storage of apps which haven’t been used for a while?
I have a very specialized authentication app which is rather precarious (because the server checks complicated encrypted data the app must provide) and this app is indeed started only once a year. Now the year is over and it doesn’t work anymore without telling me any reason. Last year I installed it and it did work well. I never changed anything since then.
It’s definitive now: my authorization app did lose it’s complete configuration data. So it wasn’t able anymore to provide a correct answer on an actual request by the server. It took me an entire week to reconstruct all this including opening two tickets on the server side for resetting the account on the server. Now it works again.
Bad, bad, bad. - How’s that possible that an app loses it’s entire storage? I didn’t clean this up myself for sure.
Sorry to hear this was so destructive. In a quick search on my phone it seems “Manage app if unused” at foot of App info page is toggled on by default for all / most apps. It is briefly described what “archive” will include. Perhaps your app got trashed by removal of certain files inappropriately regarded by Android as “temporary”.
This entire feature is indeed not good at all. It handles people like children, ignores their needs and causes more problems than it ever helps. Not even the relevant time span is told precisely, “some months”.
I tell here a truth: “unused” does not at all mean “unneeded”. So, maybe an app has not been used for a while but an automatic process can’t conclude from that that the app can be limited now and data can be deleted.
Example: I’m a mountaineer. There are sophisticated emergency apps you typically don’t use for years, never … except the one day you decided to cross a glacier and fall into a damned ice crevisse and suddenly your life depends on it. And then calling a helicopter or some local help and sending them your exact position and altitude should indeed be successful in a very short time. I do then not want to reconfigure an app with only one hand (because my other one has an open fracture) just because the app has been declared to be “unused”.
It’s indeed easy: when I configure an app so that it works then I strictly want that it works also next year or in two years. I count on that. And I must be able to achieve this on my mobile, I am the owner and the user and not the slave of my device. The minimum I expect is that I can exclude an app from such automatic background processes.
The list on my device contains actually 14 unused apps. Do I really have to check them all now, one by one?