I don’t get why Android phones have so much ram.

They often have more ram than my wife’s MacBook and the same or my as my desktop.

How much ram is needed if you’re not gaming or video editing?

In my case, it’s a very occasional picture or video recorded and then just social media apps and web. Do I need to get a phone with 12gb? Or is that just thrown in there for marketing?

  • Cloudless ☼English
    13·
    11 months ago

    Because Android multitasking is inefficient with memory use.

    My Palm Pilot had 512 kB of RAM and it could multi-task properly. When I re-open an app on Palm, I could always get back to EXACTLY where it was left off. Palm OS saves the app state before swapping it out of the RAM.

    Android apps have to completely restart from fresh after being closed. It multi-tasks by keeping apps running in memory. But you are never going to have enough RAM for the apps if you use a variety of apps.

    Samsung’s RAM Plus does something similar, but the apps are not designed to be efficient for virtual memory.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      I think inefficient is a matter of perspective. Android has somewhat different goals. For example, Java has been an enormous pain when it comes to memory use, but it provided developers when the platform critically needed attention with its first phones.

      Much work has been done on that front, but today Android places a lot of weight in helping developers write applications quickly, somewhat to the detriment of the specifications.

    • fishcurry509@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Apparently it makes it slower when u use virtual memory and causes additional additional wear and tear in the storage. Donno if that’s true but I’ve heard this being said a lot.