this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Google Pixel
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The huge amount of RAM on Android in general is less about supporting a single hungry app and more about keeping as many apps as possible in memory so that you can multitask between them without any of them losing their state. If one app manages to eat most of the memory, then it's already too little for the intended experience.
Also the memory is supposed to be enough for at least the 7 years this phone will be supported for - that's plenty of time for apps memory footprint to grow.
Maybe I'm biased by always having used devices with RAM size in the lower end (which is always also coupled by a not-so-great CPU so when you do run out of memory and the system starts killing apps you want to multitask between, you're going to notice it that much more), but I'll always take more RAM in a device that might survive a decade with a couple of battery swaps.
That's a weird way to spell "project manager who doesn't let developers waste time making efficient apps when they could just add more marketable features". The competition won't hesitate, and users will always flock to apps with more features and nicer UI over optimizations.
If you have enough RAM, there's no reason to - it's not like they are actually running and consuming CPU cycles. If you don't have enough RAM, you also don't need to - Android will do it for you. My phone with 3 GB of RAM could barely handle maps and a browser at once, so there were plenty of times when the map app restarted and recentered on my current position when I came back from checking the website of whatever company I looked at.
The recent apps screen is really just a history of open apps, with some of them maybe still in memory, and with some opaque mechanism for automatically removing old entries. You can reboot your phone and the apps will still be there with a screenshot of their last state. Doesn't mean they will get back to that state when you switch to them.