And I don’t mean just Google’s Android. Every single iteration. With their stupid memory management for PoWeR sAvInG.
I was typing up a rant on how incredibly boring and stupid Disclosure Day was when I just quickly switched to Firefox to look up a character’s name when Android decided that I was done using my Lemmy client and just outright killed it without even giving it enough time to save my comment to drafts, like it usually does.
You can never be sure when you leave an app whether it will continue doing what it’s supposed to or if it will be frozen or killed.
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel. My frickin N900 with 128 MB had better multitasking than a modern Android smartphone!
when you say “every single iteration”, does that include stuff like lineageos? Because that’s what i’ve been using for ages and i still struggle to believe how non-shitty it is.
iOS sucks hard in a lot of ways. In a lot of the same ways android sucks, in fact. One way iOS sucks more than android, is that when I tap a button on android, it actually registers the tap on the first attempt, instead of completely ignoring my multiple taps (it’s completely bonkers). Memory management is iOS’s strong suit, for sure, and android has eons to learn from apple on this. All things considered, the only thing that android has on iOS is its ability to install whatever APK I want. But Google is doing everything to stop this. If/when they do, I will have run out of reasons to stay on android.
All this to say: I get you, I hear you, and I’m here with you. You’re not alone.
Edit. Clarification
You think that’s bad, I got 12GB of memory and am only ever using 8GB of it, and it still pulls the same shit. Wild.
I’ve got 8GB and I’ve never had this problem 🤷♂️
I had 8gb in my previous phone and ran into this issue very often. It’s not inherent to android, but rather the rom the phone is running. As others have said, this can be fixed by tweaking some settings yourself.
I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue. Perhaps that might help create a less frustrating experience for you.
I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue.
Power management does nothing when RAM is as constrained as 4GB
the question is: why do two, not even three, apps consume all of the 4gb?
The operating system has to use that RAM too.
yes i know that obviously. But what do modern oses do more than they did with the memory limitations back then? They serve you more ads and they convince that taking up literally half of your memory and not even leaving enough resources for two apps is somehow necessary, when older computers hosted the os and the apps comfortably in a tiny fraction of that.
No, they do a lot more behind the scenes, running far more useful and necessary services.
Older computers couldn’t do as much as modern computers either.
Also the thing that almost no one send to have mentioned is that computers are multitaskers. People using a computer use multiple programs all at once while they’re all in focus. On phones that’s not the case unless you’re using a foldable or split screen, in which case it keeps those apps alive indefinitely without refreshing/closing. A phone is otherwise one app at a time, and any app that you haven’t used for a few minutes will get suspended so it doesn’t go back to the old days of Android’s battery life being absolutely atrocious due to apps running “full speed” in the background.
read the op’s complaint. And all those extra services shouldn’t need gb of ram anyway.
”shouldn’t need fb of ram anyway”
Says who? Based on what?
the question is: why do two, not even three, apps consume all of the 4gb?
Mozilla had to fire a big part of their browser engineering team to raise the salary of their CEO. That’s how FF is less optimized.
Adding, I disabled all background access to all of the programs I don’t regularly use / expect to return to.
Only like 5 apps have any background access and they never get auto-cleared.
Between that and GOS letting me block network access to apps that really shouldn’t need it, my battery lasts for days.
Title correction: “I hate default settings!”
seriously, lineageos after having dived into every setting is by far the best mobile experience these days, i’m almost never even slightly annoyed by it.
I don’t love Android either and would be much happier back on iOS but with everything happening to tech I’ll use Graphene until the seas look a bit smoother
Ugh, don’t get me started on iOS. Wanted to copy some files onto my daughter’s iPad and discovered that it stops the copy operation when you click on the folder that’s being copied. Maybe even when you click anywhere, didn’t dare test that.
I just wish Nokia had open sourced Maemo. That had everything you need fully working.
nokia did open source maemo and it’s still being developed by the community. look up on maemo leste. unfortunately they only support very few phones, including the nokia n900, motorola droid 4 xt894 and the original pinephone.
really hoping i can daily drive that os at some point on some modern powerful hardware
I thought Maemo Leste was a reimplementation effort and not a continuation.
Yes it’s a very stupid memory management meant to improve battery life by killing any app thats been running at all…
Very frustrating and idiot.
Try play any game nowadays… The instant you switch away bam, killed.
It’s baked into android. AOSP I mean, any and all android flavours.
Disabling optimization for battery doesn’t help with any bigger app.
Nah. Thats just because the world decided your opinion was shit and didnt need to be shared. Yet here you are sharing it anyway.
Are you alright?
Mishandling an OOM killer event is generally speaking developer error.
To me it looks like sometimes Android is sending KILL instead of TERM. because sometimes it works like it should and sometimes it doesn’t. Not just with the one app.
If it’s an open source app, you could test what’s happening in
onSaveInstanceStateandonCreatewithsavedInstanceState/onRestoreInstanceState, maybe by attaching some tracing to it.
I feel like this might be the wrong community for this
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
OP uses 4GB RAM but blames the OS.
Android does need a lot of ram these days especially if you are running stock
I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking. Chances are they are have a ton of background stuff running and are using apps that use lots of memory
I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking.
A couple of months ago I revived an old x86 tablet using postmarketOS. No Android anywhere. The only somewhat usable browser I could find was Falkon. Firefox was absolutely unusable. Ungoogled Chromium was a bit better but overall still shitty. Opening a second tab under Falkon was too much as well. The problematic component was 100% the web browser and there Firefox specifically. OP writes that he opened Firefox and I can confirm from my own experience of using Firefox on a RAM constrained non-Android device that FF is terrible in such scenarios. FF is great otherwise but not when RAM is low.
Android probably would’ve been a slightly better experience as it is designed to work in low ram scenarios. However it still would’ve been slow as hell.
Running what is effectively desktop Firefox on a system not necessarily designed for mobile is not going to play well with low ram at all
And he’s right with that.
Android blew up with Kitkat (4.2) but even then, in 2020 was 6 GB much.
One of the problems is the only official IDE (Android Studio) stuffing every imagibable compatibility library in the apps, because dependency resolution is too hard for them (which is also because of how the OS is structured).
Btw, when i did Android app dev in 2021, i was astounded, that there’s MaterialUI and whatnot, but you still had to implement every little detail (button size, dark mode, etc) manually. I guess that’s the web dev generation; they don’t know it different.
I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)
A bunch of the “fediverse” reacts poorly to this. But, speaking as someone who never even considered Apple, using Android doesn’t have to mean it’s smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.
using Android doesn’t have to mean it’s smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.
No OS can do magic and turn 4GB RAM into a suitable amount for memory hungry modern web browsers.
Funny, I switched to Android because iOS was doing shit like this.
Yeah, that one is even worse.
Your phone. Not my phone, so it doesn’t seem like an android problem.
Or possibly the apps you are using? I don’t think I have ever had this problem.
But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.
But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.
4GB RAM, a modern web browser, and no swap file/partition. That doesn’t work well anywhere. Not Android, not GNU/Linux, not Windows, not macOS.
ah today’s young ones… can’t imagine a whole computer with less than 128 mb of ram and still being able to multitask better than a phone with 12g of ram
Bullshit
True, we were running windows 7 with 4gb of ram, gaming with YouTube in the background getting notifications from some Skype with lots of Facebook messages pinging as well and an android would never. Why?
I felt like I should add something to defense side, so I did a quick install of Linux Mint limited to 4GB of RAM, with no swap.
I didn’t know what to run, so here’s LibreOffice Impress, SuperTuxKart, and Firefox with this Lemmy post open, streaming internet radio, playing 1080p YouTube video, and an additional tab with forum post about forcing software rendering as SuperTuxKart was horribly broken inside the VM.Fits into the 4GB.
Additionally, just for fun, you can see the RAM usage on my host, also nearing full usage. You may also see a pretty solid benchmark of the VM disk in the screenshot. This is because I installed the VM into tmpfs on the host.
Seems pretty damn usable, even for some multi-tasking.
People really underestimate how little RAM Linux actually uses. You could run it on pretty much anything. I think it uses about 50% less than Windows 11?
Using a card on a web site. Verified by Visa web page: “we have emailed you the code”. So I go to the email app and get the code. Switch back to the web page. Web page: “what? Who the fuck are you?”
I’ve also switched from the web browser to my password manager with the password manager integration and as soon as I’ve chosen the password it goes back to the browser and it reloads the page without filling in the frickin password.
It annoys me that Voyager is smart enough to save my comment text, but not smart enough to save the post URL so it can open back up to the same place.
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel.
In which world is 4GB enough to multitask a web browser under any OS?
You’re right. I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn’t get anything done.
I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn’t get anything done.
Try to get a modern web browser working on your Win98 machine. The problem is modern web browsers eating RAM, not Android.
Found the Chromium dev!
But seriously, I’ve got an old laptop still in use and that’s getting along fine on 4 GB. Firefox, KDE, Libre Office, background tasks, some light gaming, no problem.
Usually good programs only take lots of memory when it’s available.
Yeah, a lot of programs are just really inefficient.
I’ve recently been looking around my system to see what’s eating my RAM. Mullvad VPN eats around 200MiB because the GUI is using Electron…But seriously, I’ve got an old laptop still in use and that’s getting along fine on 4 GB. Firefox, KDE, Libre Office, background tasks, some light gaming, no problem.
Let me guess: That old laptop has a swap file or partition?
If you dislike Android so much, get https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-october-2026 Should pair well with your new >1000 Euro Steam Machine.
I would definitely buy a Jolla Phone or it would work in the US.
I might buy it when they actually promised verified boot of some kind.
Also: are they still offering subscriptions instead of selling the os like they’re supposed to?
I really want to like this platform, but the security functions (especially for evil maid) are really important with smartphones.
Also: isn’t bubblewrap more modern than firejail? Why haven’t they switched yet?
I would definitely buy a Jolla Phone or it would work in the US.
It should work there. The problem for you would be no direct shipping to the US.
I’ve got 16GB of RAM in mine and it’ll still kill my podcast/music/audiobook app that’s actively playing content … I’ve never had it kill my mBin app though (Interstellar), so, I guess that’s nice.
