As an Android user, one of my biggest complaint with the OS is the lack of a complete backup solution. While Google does backup Wi-Fi passwords, contacts, photos and other (very limited) system settings in certain cases, it does not offer anyway to backup the app data or app settings.

Through Google Play games, Google does offer cloud backup of game data, but it is still not possible to backup app data and settings. This makes switching to a new Android phone a very tedious experience as you are required to setup all your apps again. 

With Android M, Google is finally solving this issue once and for all. The company has added an automatic backup feature in M that automatically uploads your app data to your Google Drive account. The uploaded data is encrypted for additional security.

While Android M is still in its preview stages, Google is offering every app up to 25MB of space on Google Drive for backup purposes. This storage space is completely free and does not count against the existing storage space on Drive that you already have.

Read: Android M Feature Preview: App permissions

The best part about the cloud data backup feature in Android M, is that it is completely automatic and does not require any kind of input from you. Backups occur every 24 hours, when the device is idle, connected to a Wi-Fi network and is being charged. If you switch to a new device and install the same set of apps, their backed up data is automatically downloaded on the new device without any intervention from you.

Developers can specify the data of their that Google needs to backup or exclude through the manifest file of their app. The feature automatically excludes caches and any other similar type of file. If you are a developer, you can find more information about how this feature works here.

Ideally, Google should have also added an option to create local data backups in Android M, since restoring app data from cloud is going to be data intensive. Additionally, it can take a long amount of time if there are more than a few apps involved, and not everyone in this world has access to a high speed internet connection. Nonetheless, it is at least great to see that Google has finally fixed one of the longstanding gripes that most Android users have had with the OS with M.

Android M is scheduled to be released sometime in Q3 of this year, with the developer preview build of the OS slated to receive two more OTA updates before that.

What do you think about the new automatic cloud backup of app data in Android M?