backup and restoring Android apps easily . The thing is, 7 out of 10 times someone has to back up and restore apps on his Android is because he is probably trying out a new custom ROM on his device . Other than that one hardly needs a reason to restore backed up apps frequently. Now, whenever someone installs a ROM on his device, it’s done using a custom recovery installed on the device like the ClockworkMod recovery or the EXT4 recovery. Moreover, these ROMs are packed as zip files, which are flashed to install it into the phone’s memory. How about creating a zip archive file of all the apps installed on your Android and flashing it directly from the recovery after installing the app? Sounds cool, huh! As the method does not require any third party app in the restoration process, you will no longer have to download the backup app from the market to restore all of them. Also the restoration process is a lot quicker than the conventional methods.
Creating Flashable Update File
App2zip is a nifty app for Android that easily creates a flashable update.zip file for all the apps installed on your device. The app requires root access on your phone, but that’s not a problem as we would be using it for devices that have a custom recovery installed on them. After you install and run the application, it will ask you to grant it superuser (root) access. Having done that, the app will read the apps and their data and list it. All the user apps will be listed first followed by system apps. All you need to do now is select the app you would like to back up and tap the Go button. The app will read the packages and make an update.zip file for them. You can rename the backup file if you want. Later when you want to restore it, all you need to do is flash the zip file using the custom recovery. Note: As the app is still in its early release phase, please test the app to back up and restore a single useless app before you trust it with all your apps. The app worked on my One X, and I hope it does for you too.
Conclusion
To be frank, the app is cool. I have been looking forward to this such an app over a year now and with App2zip I can say that I got my perfect application backup solution. Still for backing up contacts and SMS, I continue to prefer Wondershare MobileGo.
