Expectation: Shift toward leaner apps/app building frameworks, more user control about background process management
Likely reality: Background app killing becomes even more aggressive, multitasking (somehow) sucks even harder lmaoooooo
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Android
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"shortage"
I do find it a bit odd that my phone has 12gb of memory which is a shitload. Maybe refine software?
Why should we, the developers, invest money into refining software when we can just get you, the users, to invest in more hardware?
we, the developers, invest money
The developers don’t invest money and they don’t decide shit. Software is not optimised because the managers and shareholders are only interested in more tracking and new “features” that only exist to deliver a payload of more tracking. More tracking means more data that can be sold.
Optimisation funding is under error margin levels in the vast majority of industries and for the vast majority of products.
Far too many developers are also terrible at their job and are unable to write decent code in the first place, but they get zero say either way.
Ah, a fellow veteran
Why not both?
Because more hardware means sell for more money
Yeah, that’s one half of both.
6 GB RAM phone user here. What are you all doing with that RAM on your phones?!
4GB here, recently I wanted to try out a local AI and was informed by the popup that 6GB is the bare minimum.
So, it won't be until my next upgrade that I can travel abroad and have image translation on my FOSS phone.
I just checked mine, 6gb here too. It's probably been a month since my last restart. Only using 4.2gb. I have no idea what I would do with more.
My phone idles at 6.8 for some ungodly reason.
That's because empty RAM is wasted RAM.
You want to keep RAM full of stuff you aren't using right now. That stuff can be erased almost instantly if you need the RAM for something else. That's why OSs list "Available RAM" and "Free RAM" as two separate things.
Removing all the idle apps from RAM just means you need to wait longer every time you open one of them.
Yes, this is true, and I have preached this in the past, but...
They're not treating it as a cache. Most of these apps don't function with less ram.
It's just inefficiencies stacked on inefficiencies. And yeah, they didn't matter a ton at first, because our hardware was advancing fast enough to handle it. But at some point we should really go back and visit a lot of this stuff.
A 2014 computer should have gotten better at all the basic tasks that existed then, not worse.
The Windows 11 start menu being built on React is a good example. Insanity.
8.3gb idle here. Im pretty sure Im a part of aws without knowing it.
I just closed everything and got the below.
Being spied on by the US, China, Russia and the rest of the five eyes alliance.
Phones are being pushed to have full 3D game experiences. For example: running new resident evil games or Death Stranding. These things need that memory. It’s unified memory, so it’s RAM and VRAM all in one.
It also enables multitasking. And if you are on Android, you are running Chrome, right? Notorious RAM eater.
I don't have games on my phone and I use duckduckgo. Every phone I've ever had has been at 60% memory usage idle.
You’d have to rewrite about 17 years worth of Android software for that. They chose a garbage collector based programming language/VM, can’t replace that with something more efficient without basically rewriting all software. Looks like Apple made the right choice here by going with a reference counting scheme.
I mean, Android isn't just Java, and iOS has plenty of bloat. They both run gnarly cross-platform frameworks.
A bigger factor is probably their approach. iOS started life as "one app runs at a time" and gradually grew sleeping and background jobs as features. Android (mostly) allowed apps to do pretty much anything in the background, and only recently started cracking down on the worst abuses.
When using garbage collection there is a trade-off between memory usage and performance. If you run the garbage collector a lot, memory usage is low but performance is crap (because it’s spending a lot of CPU cycles on the GC), if you rarely run it the performance is good but memory usage goes up by a lot (because memory isn’t released often enough). You have to pick a point between those two extremes.
Turns out that if you want to have similar performance as a non-GC language you use about 3 times as much RAM compared to the non-GC language.
Turns out that if you want to have similar performance as a non-GC language you use about 3 times as much RAM compared to the non-GC language.
How does this work with respect to your previous comparison with iOS now that the iPhone 17 comes with 8GB RAM? Are you implying that no Android phones will reach performance parity with iPhones until they start shipping with 24GB RAM?
No, it’s not as simple as that. A large part of Android is written in C++ and not Java or Kotlin. Think of things like the web browser. Also things like more demanding games will be written in C++ so they won’t be affected by this at all.
It’s mostly the simpler Java/Kotlin based apps, which will be a majority of the apps on the Play Store. They don’t necessarily need the performance, but they will be more wasteful with memory than comparable iOS apps.
Not too long ago, 4 or 6 GB ram were plenty. What happened that modern Android „needs“ that much memory?
I think we're starting to see people using their phone as their primary computing device and are asking more and more from it as they abandon laptops and desktops
High resolution graphical assets are big. That's why we're now getting 32GB video cards in desktop PCs.
Sure, nobody's doing super high end graphics on a phone, but it doesn't take much high resolution art to take a big bite out of that 6GB. Phones don't have separate system and video RAM, remember.
Android has traditionally been very stingy with memory. Like really stingy. It depended on the device but back in those days you could not assume your app could use more than 16MB of RAM. That was the default heap size limit. High-res devices often had the limit set to 24MB.
Only starting with Android 3.x apps could request more (largeHeap setting in the manifest).
By contrast, iPhones around that time had 2GB of RAM but an app could use almost all of it.
Dont worry, Samsung will now use 8gb
Hey, can we go back to legit flip phones and not this stupid tri-fold gimmick they keep trying to push around like AI?
I actually like the form factor of the folds. I want them to get better.
Just about the only recent development that seems innovative in any way instead of just "ooooh many megapixels" or "oooohhh so thin!"
I can't recall who it was, either LG or Samsung, but I remember a device that had a screen that pulled/rolled out to become tablet size. I so wanted them to iterate on that idea.
Ooooh I remember that, It was the LG Rollable!
Unfortunately LG's Mobile division went kaput. I have no idea if they sold off parts of it or the tech to anyone...
You're the MVP! I'm sorry, but how fucking cool was that?!
Oh no! Anyway...