Yes, but as a result, memory-intensive applications (usually games) crash all the time, especially on older devices, which the App Store won't let you filter ou

Yes, but as a result, memory-intensive applications (usually games) crash all the time, especially on older devices, which the App Store won't let you filter out. What are you going to anyway, just start deallocating the memory your application needs to actually work, so that you can display an "I'm sorry, we're out of memory" message? Might as well crash then. The amount of memory available also varies wildly from user to user and you can't put a memory requirement on an application. So what do people do? Disregard the issue. Even the best games on the App Store have tons of one star reviews by people with older devices. The flip side is that application that are prone to crash are pressured to optimize for relatively quick and painless restart.