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!
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 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.
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 gb of ram anyway”
Says who? Based on what?
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.
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.
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.
Yes, because this type of memory management is basically at the core of Android. That’s why I hate it when Graphene, LineageOS and similar are touted as “Android alternatives”.
They are much much better than pure Android or whatever vendors usually slap on their phones. But they are still Android at the core.
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.
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
ah today’s young ones…
Thanks.
Bullshit
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.
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’ve got 4 GB of RAM
Sadly that’s an almost unusable amount these days. The OS will use half of that just sitting idle, and Google Play Services will use a fifth of the remainder (you can enable Developer Mode and view running services to see this yourself). 4 gigs is solidly in the “only one or two apps open at a time” range.
(It doesn’t help that every Android app includes its own separate copies of all its libraries and dependencies for compatibility reasons. There’s no such thing as a lightweight app without going out of your way to avoid the normal development ecosystem)
Android also doesn’t use swap (storing unused/rarely accessed memory contents on the disk for later), instead shifting stale memory pages to a compressed block in RAM (zram), so once it starts filling up with cached background apps it has to start killing apps or the system will hang. The less RAM you have, the sooner this will happen, and both Lemmy clients and web browsers use a ton of RAM.
Android also doesn’t use swap
Years ago a friend of mine actually enabled swap on a MicroSD. It worked, no idea for how long, though. That type of memory isn’t reliable enough to handle this.
Even setting aside the wear and tear issues with flash storage, swap and zram sadly don’t play nice together. Zram will fill up with stale memory while swap gets the fresh stuff, which is the exact opposite of what you want and causes awful performance problems.
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.
If your lemmy client is Voyager, its not an Android only issue. Happens on iOS as well.
If ever there was an excuse to switch to a E/os or another legacy android custom ROM like Lineage OS.
Because with only 4GB of RAM you’re not going to get the performance you want because the operating system for newer phones takes up so much of that RAM usage.
What you’re doing right now seems like you’re attempting to push your hardware beyond it’s limitations to run software that your phone isn’t specced for.
Google generally gets around this by providing a lighter weight version of their OS for bottom tier specced phones with Android GO, and budget phones were a lot of the reason they tried this.
It’s either that or, you have settings configured in such a way that when you close certain apps they aren’t persistent in memory (which makes sense with a budget phone or a low specced phone) and honestly that could also be Google’s fault because of default settings and their propensity for memory leaks.
I would argue that it’s not every iteration of android, but I get your point. I don’t think you were looking for solutions, but just in case, my comment is here.
4GB ram is enough for a glorified Lemmy/PornHub device. I use a Redmi 4x with 4GB and a snapdragon 435. It’s fast enough for modern mobile games (well barely). The only problem is the modern internet with too-much scripts to actually be performant on low-end devices.
Android is mostly problematic if it’s a stock operating system, filled with corporate spyware, which makes the device run terribly.
My Redmi was practically useless before installing Lineage OS. Now it’s good enough for most things I do.
4GB ram is enough for a glorified Lemmy/PornHub device. I use a Redmi 4x with 4GB and a snapdragon 435. It’s fast enough for modern mobile games (well barely).
Not anymore. Phones running Android 15 can get a full version of android rather than the Go variant but Android 16 and above require 6 GB of RAM or you’ll have to use the Go variant.
At the end of the day the entire OS has gotten bloated with features and apps have gotten larger and more resource hungry.
On my device I have 5.2GB of RAM currently allocated to “System”, and 2.9GB allocated to apps.
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.
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
Funny, I switched to Android because iOS was doing shit like this.
Yeah, that one is even worse.
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.
Agree about Disclosure Day – what a letdown.
Disagree about Android, but that does suck.
I feel like this might be the wrong community for this
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
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.
My 4GB iPhone 13 mini is working well still. Even my iPad mini 5 from 2020 still works fine (albeit a little sluggish occasionally) with 3GB of ram.
I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)
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 have 12GB of RAM in my phone (in comparison to 4GB in my mini PC (good enough for XFCE (although the browser will still eat a good chunk))), the only thing that runs realiably is Termux.
But the power management is just shit. My last 2 phones kill the fucking built-in alarm clock. I can set it to unrestricted in settings, I can enable exception in DuraSpeed, or do whatever many steps the current device needs, but at best it’s a coin flip whether alarm will work or not.
