13 ms·

Android 13 requires devices to have more than 2GB RAM and 16GB storage

195 points by teleforce 4y ago

RockingGoodNite 4y ago
My phone is about 5 years old, not getting cool updates any more. I'm about 95% sure there are many moments when the OS inserts a fake pause in various places to make me think the phone is getting slow and it's time to upgrade.
- kapitanjakc 4y ago
  I've had that issue. At first I thought it was because of heavy apps that I used. Teams, WhatsApp and the likes. I removed everything and it is still very slow in opening the browser. I wanted to root it and check if it works but got confused as there are numerous choice available for rooting OS.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Have you tried a total wipe and reinstall? It’s rarely needed but can make a difference in such circumstances.
  - astrange 4y ago
    If the battery or storage is aged it can slow down apparently unrelated things. They're both consumable components.
  - rraghur 4y ago
    More likely flash degradation than any explicit code to insert delays
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      A normal user had better not see flash degradation. With the massive price per TB manufacturers charge for extra capacity, I expect ultra platinum quality.
- MBCook 4y ago
  In 2017 Apple introduced the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X. All three still get updates this year. That’s five years of support. They may get updated next year+, we don’t know yet. You know what the iPhone 8 had? 2GB of RAM. Same as Google is calling for now. And people have been through this over and over. Apple does not insert fake delays to make phones feel slower. If you could prove that you could make a mint. They add features, which takes extra CPU. Though not all are on every phone for that exact reason. How many Android phones from 5 years ago got 5 years of updates? How about 2 years?
  - gpt5 4y ago
    Apple does throttle your phone when your battery degrades. They do it by default because it helps avoid situations where the phones would shut down completely before the battery empties. There was a class action on this, and now they allow you to toggle this feature off: https://www.itpro.com/mobile/battery-life/356946/how-to-turn-off-battery-throttling-on-iphone https://www.itpro.com/mobile/battery-life/356946/how-to-turn...
    - MBCook 4y ago
      Right. That was a real reason due to hardware issues, though the way they went about it was obviously received negatively (no notification and no option at first). It wasn’t fake delays just to push hardware sales, which is what people have been accusing them of for 10+ years.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        It must be insane being a manager at these megacorps. Imagine fixing a bug at work and accidentally kicking off a decade of bad press, memes, and legal issues because the fix was not communicated perfectly. I agree they should have explained to the user better, but imagine how many minor behind the scenes fixes they have to fix and can’t possibly bother the user with them all. I can see how these things slipped through.
        4y ago
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  It's funny I've been down voted for speaking my mind about observations I've made over years of using my current phone and the trend is true for my past android phones. I've had 3 other android phones. The last one, Nexus 6, I dropped and the gorilla glass cracked really bad, figured it was a loss and got my current LG phone and it has been great except for the suspicious slow downs which cannot be attributed to wear of the storage. I say that as someone who has been a technological person for 5 decades and a paid software engineer for almost 3 decades. The one before that, Nexus 4, the thing was charging on my desk, I looked over and saw it bulging like it was going to explode. The one before that, Nexus One, I still have, had to stop using it when the hard wired paltry amount of system space and increasing OS size made it unusable. Glad they stopped that practice of forcing the OS into a tiny space. I like my LG so it's too bad they got out of or announced they are leaving the phone business. I've traded several thousand of my dollars to Google for their phones since they started making them. I never owned iPhone, have no plans to either.
  - aintmeit 4y ago
    Don't let the downvotes interfere with your rockin' good nite. But also please double down on explaining yourself. vroom vroom
scarface74 4y ago
For reference: those were the specs of the 2015 iPhone 6S/iPhone 6S Plus
- kapitanjakc 4y ago
  in 2015 2gigs ram in a phone was premium I think.. I had a cheap one from Xiaomi and was happy with 2gigs
- MBCook 4y ago
  It was also the spec of the iPhone 8, which gets iOS 16 this year and is thus considered fully supported. Seems reasonable on Google’s part to me.
  - gpt5 4y ago
    Except that this article is about Android Go, which is a stripped down version of Android (with special, stripped down Google apps as well). iOS 16 on iPhone 8 would be the full experience (and would run much more smoothly than those 2GB Android Go phones).
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  A different reference: in 2011 my Xperia Arc S was running happily with 512MB RAM on Android 2.3
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The iPhone 4S released in 2011 also had 512MB RAM and got its last security update in 2019
    - matyasrichter 4y ago
      And only got updated to iOS 9. Naturally, the minimum requirements for later version were greater than that.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
metadat 4y ago
Android seems to be growing inferior to iOS in almost every way, which I find sad. I prefer to root for the underdog. * Privacy * Security * Efficiency I have a personal Android S22+ and an iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone gets better with every update, whereas there's always something funky going on with my droid. Every update does something weird, fixing one thing and breaking something new, and managing to offer no significant privacy improvements. In fact, today it is Samsung, the world's second largest phone vendor (outside of China), who is the one getting hit by data breaches, leaks, and hacks on an ongoing basis.
- throwaway2056 4y ago
  Did you install all the same apps that you have in S22+ in iPhone 13 mini? Likely not. Please do fair comparison. If you install 100 + apps in iPhone it is also terrible.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Yes they have as many apps in common as possible. Both 256GB versions. The Android does get more use, but there's no denying the camera lag has been there since day one with the S22+. Previously I used (and still adore) the S10e. It's camera lag actually seemed slightly better than with the S22+, but still inferior to any recent iPhone (10x or newer).
- Ninjinka 4y ago
  I prefer to root the underdog
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    Outstanding pun
    - andrew_ 4y ago
      Did people not understand that the lack of "for" in that sentence was a pun about rooting Android?
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
The sad thing is that even with 2GB an Android device can't reliably multitask without forcing background apps to sleep and purge data. Devs only testing on flagship phones means that a lesser pocket supercomputer results in unnecessarily poor performance.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  A lot of the issues related to multitask actually comes from OEM customizations. Many Android OEMs, especially Samsung, would make killing background apps more aggressive. Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    I have an Android One phone and it behaves just as badly. This is a fundamental systemic problem with core Android development. I dread system updates because I know some of the key apps (maps in particular) are going to have a worse experience than before.
  - toast0 4y ago
    iOS does much better here because it started with apps only running while in the foreground and limited background processing has been added over time in specific cases. On the other hand, Android originally let apps do whatever, whenever, and has tried to rein that in over time, through 3rd party tools, manufacturer tools and changes to the OS; but it's so fragile, because apps don't always cleanly separate... And a lot of apps will try their hardest to wakeup and do something that's not really important whenever they can.
  - Dunedan 4y ago
    I run AOSP and can confirm the claims of the parent comment. It's not just OEM customizations, Android itself got way more memory hungry in the past years. Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.
- 4y ago
stevespang 4y ago
lawgimenez 4y ago
I have been developing Android apps since Eclair, and I'm from a "developing" country. For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history. So fast and fluid, it can run on the most low-end smartphones at that time. Developing for it was also very fun. Then I remember KitKat OS came and it was all hell broke loose. Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want In my history of ~11 years of Android development, it's just hard to purchase a Google phone. I bought a Nexus tablet but I have to ask my sister in the US to ship it to me. The shipping fee is ridiculous high I remember. Then they introduced Pixel and Go editions but still I couldn't purchase officially from Google. I have to ask favor from someone in the US/EU to ship it to me.
- roneythomas6 4y ago
  I have used Jelly Bean both on S3 and Nexus 4. What I found is that Jelly Bean gets really slow after a while and you need to factory reset every couple of months. Newer versions of Android don't have this issue.
  - danuker 4y ago
    A factory reset unapplies all updates. But for instance, Chrome will auto-update even without you being logged into a Google account.
    - roneythomas6 4y ago
      Factory reset on android can only reset the apps to the version of the app that came with the OS release. It doesn't revert any OS updates. Also all apps are updated by Google Play as long as you're logged in and haven't disabled auto-update.
      - danuker 4y ago
        Android 5 did revert my Chrome. Sites worked faster for a while on my very old device.
hahnchen 4y ago
Does this also apply to android installed on smart devices? I doubt they have those specs
aasasd 4y ago
I mean, with 2 GB of memory you'll only be able to use the phone as an ebook reader anyway—and I don't mean PDF because scrolling is gonna be a bitch, what with incessant garbage collection in the background. As for storage, for me Android 11 occupies 17 GB of it.
rektide 4y ago
Title appears wrong. The past two year requirememt was 1GB and that has been raised to 2GB. Not more than. There's some decent bints about how to use the platform effectively here. onTrimMemory is something most apps probably just dont do. Knowing when and how to use mmap to access resources is obvious to folks with some systems backgrounds, but we'd be lucky if that's half of mobile developers. In general it's just really easy to build badly behaved apps anywhere, on any platform. Seeing the magnitude of resources we're using & seeing problems develop is something mentioned in the article, but so often requires fairly expensive paid observability tools & a team that knows & has capacity & backing to care & spend the time. Most orgs care way too much about shipping features that pad their resume; few get promoted for keeping software in good shape.
Mikeb85 4y ago
And? That's typical specs from 9 years ago...
greggman3 4y ago
It's kind of insane to me that my phone (Android or iOS) requires 2GB of ram and 16GB of storage given that in 1995 my WindowsNT 4.0 PC with 128Meg of ram and maybe 2gb HD ran 3DStudio Max to render 3D effects and movies and and ran Photoshop and MS Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and now it takes 2GB to just write messages, and share photos :P
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Did your 95 computer use ML for photo post processing, or have 120hz display, or have 200 processes running at a time? Why are you pretending 1995 is like today?
  - greggman3 4y ago
    I'm not. But my iPhone can't run an app as sophisticated as 3DSMax and it doesn't multitask to the same level as that 1995 machine.
    - govg 4y ago
      Your iPhone can run apps far more sophisticated than anything 3dsmax could do 27 years ago.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        It can in theory, I practice not really.
      - diffeomorphism 4y ago
        So why doesn't it?
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      3DSMax from 1995 could probably run emulated in iOS Safari.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
PieUser 4y ago
What's wrong with that?
jimrandomh 4y ago
It wouldn't make sense for the operating system alone to consume 2GB RAM/16GB storage, but an Android version number also represents a compatibility level for apps and handsets. If an app developer tests their app on Android 13 but doesn't test it on older Android versions, they probably aren't testing on low-RAM devices, either. And if a consumer buys a handset after checking only the Android version number, and doesn't check details like the RAM and storage, they'll probably be find out that apps which they expected to work don't work, and be quite unhappy.
- roneythomas6 4y ago
  Android version number for a app developer is only for API compatibility. It doesn't ensure memory or storage. The above minimum memory and storage is for OEM's so they can ensure new version of Android can run properly on their devices.
MBCook 4y ago
I don’t follow the Android world, so I’m out of my depth. I saw this announcement but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Is it just that it makes it hard/impossible to make super cheap Android phones by raising the minimum BoM? 2GB is the minimum RAM for iOS 16 as well, so this doesn’t seem crazy. If they said 4GB or 6GB I would understand better.
- scarface74 4y ago
  But the cheapest iOS device is $429. You can find cheap unsubsidized Android phones for less than $100.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  2GB is also the minimum RAM for Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS. I think what people are wondering is how the much more constrained application environment on a phone has become that demanding of system resources?
  - rosywoozlechan 4y ago
    > Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS Given all the fancy things phones can do nowaydays, talk to satellites, crash detection, gyroscopes, GPS, all in a tiny form factor while managing battery life and a massively powerful camera, I'd argue desktop has maybe less capability than a smartphone OS
    - blep_ 4y ago
      All of those things are implemented as dedicated hardware, though. There is no GPS process looping and reading individual bits out of the air to assemble them into GPS packets. People regularly do all of these things on tiny microcontrollers with no OS.
helf 4y ago
Android has been a mess for awhile and it isn’t getting better. A lot of bullshit is being done for “security” which will just end up recreating some of the sandboxed nightmares from iOS. The enforcement of Scoped Storage with Android 13 it going to essentially recreate the nightmare of file management that is iOS. It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.
lenkite 4y ago
Wow! - A 4x increase in minimum memory over just 5 years. And it appears that they are desperately fighting memory leaks. Maybe the Android Team should consider a "Rewrite to Rust" project, introduce a better designed API for native apps and market an "Android Yoga".
- dapids 4y ago
  You think moving to rust will reduce the memory footprint?? Interesting viewpoint...
  - lenkite 4y ago
    It is well accepted that GC-based runtimes greatly increase memory footprint. A tracing GC might need upto several times the memory to match manual memory management. Nothing interesting about the "viewpoint". https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performance.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...
    - dapids 4y ago
      I think you missed the sarcasm in my post. I was not at all serious and completely subscribe to everything you just mentioned
- dangus 4y ago
  Is that a lot? Smartphones were in their infancy until very recently. I think 2GB is entirely reasonable, especially because the Android ecosystem doesn't require the latest OS version to be a commercially viable and usable phone. Windows 98 required 16MB of RAM, Windows XP required 4x more (64MB) and it was released just 3 years later. I can see some Android phones with 2GB of RAM that cost under $100.
zaptheimpaler 4y ago
Oh no they want phones made in 2022 to have a whole 2GB of RAM! So that consumers can expect a certain baseline level of responsiveness and performance on any Android phone unlike the fragmented mess now. so evil omg fuck google!!111 i hate technology take me back to Nokia 3300!!!!! I used to be young and free and hot :( :( :(
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Pretty accurate satire on most of the threads on this site. People just see “Google” in the headline and start frothing with rage. Anything but the latest Rust encrypted notes app gets strangely hate filled threads.
  - forchune3 4y ago
    hating google is not strange
bluSCALE4 4y ago
I was rummaging through my things and found two Samsung S3's. One wouldn't charge and one had a missing screen. The one that didn't charge was mine and it has Cyanogen Mod, likely a nightly build. I may have modified the partitions as well but alas couldn't use it. So I swapped out the boards and boom, a working phone from 2013-2014. Batteries still held a decent charge. Point is, I remembered that custom mod and it was great. I believe for everyday use, the battery didn't last but all in all, it was an amazing phone and OS build. I really miss those days.
TekMol 4y ago
I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again. Compare that to writing web apps. You open an empty text file in a text editor and are ready to go.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again At least it's cross-platform and it doesn't require you to buy special hardware like the main mobile competitor does.
  - anaganisk 4y ago
    Main mobile competitor in US
    - jjcon 4y ago
      Are there countries where there is another main competitor? iOS is at like 30% global market share isn’t it (a bit higher in North America, uk, and some Asian countries like japan, lower elsewhere) I’m not aware of anywhere having a larger competitor to android though.
- ismayilzadan 4y ago
  I had a complete opposite experience a few weeks ago. It took me about an hour max to install Android Studio in Manjaro, install SDKs, spin up Android VM, pull open source Android keyboard app and add my own customised layout, then test it in VM and install to my phone. There were no errors at all. Just clicking buttons and waiting. -edit: typo
  - ris58h 4y ago
    What opensource keyboard app was it?
jokoon 4y ago
Wirth's law strikes again.
davidkuennen 4y ago
I don't get what's wrong with this at all. At some point you have to up the specs. And 2GB RAM + 16GB storage doesn't feel out of place at all. Rather low for any phone from the past 5 to 10 years.
- gpt5 4y ago
  This is Android Go, which is a stripped down version of Android with more limited Google Apps. iOS 16 will work fully (and smoothly) on devices with 2GB of RAM like the iPhone 8.
  - cma 4y ago
    I think maybe they only think it works well because the iOS crash reporter won't even keep your forms filled out if you switch back to the other app to check on the error and have only 2GB of RAM. Each app has to persist its state when backgrounded and they didn't even bother for the crash reporter/feedback app.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Ridiculous bloat.
nazgulsenpai 4y ago
These Apple vs Google conversations on HN remind me of console wars on old forums or even the modern US political discourse. Everyone picks their team and relentlessly defends or attacks the other team whenever possible, when both teams want all of your money and to lock you in perpetually.
jmartin2683 4y ago
Android is a slow motion train wreck.
DesiLurker 4y ago
it used to be Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away now it is Qualcomm giveth and Google taketh away. Seriously tho we even had palmOS and WindowsCE running on 2 decades old arm cores and now we cannot run linux properly on multi-billion transistor gigahertz cores!
- jeremycarter 4y ago
  Bring back the Windows Phone!
mproud 4y ago
Misleading; 2 GB/16 GB or more.
mancerayder 4y ago
What in the world provoked Android to forcefeed a feature that auto-predicts a reply and make it pop up as a notification quick reply? Example: do you want to hang out later? someone sends me. Android offers: "Sure" and "I don't think so". I'm much more likely to hit the wrong thing by accident - when I never use either of these "shortcuts." My google-foo is awful: I spent time looking for ways to turn it off for Signal but all the search results don't seem to apply to my version of Android and Signal (all the latest, and a Pixel). I had trouble even figuring out what's that called (eventually I discovered it's called Smart Reply). And typing is awful. It seems easier to type on the iPhone. And the battery life in ALL my pixels is always almost exactly 12 months before massive denigration, without fail. I leave it plugged in overnight every day, so that could be why. Someone please give me an excuse to move to an iPhony.
batmanturkey 4y ago
Bloated software sells more hardware

195 points by teleforce 4y ago

My phone is about 5 years old, not getting cool updates any more. I'm about 95% sure there are many moments when the OS inserts a fake pause in various places to make me think the phone is getting slow and it's time to upgrade.

kapitanjakc 4y ago
I've had that issue. At first I thought it was because of heavy apps that I used. Teams, WhatsApp and the likes. I removed everything and it is still very slow in opening the browser. I wanted to root it and check if it works but got confused as there are numerous choice available for rooting OS.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Have you tried a total wipe and reinstall? It’s rarely needed but can make a difference in such circumstances.
- astrange 4y ago
  If the battery or storage is aged it can slow down apparently unrelated things. They're both consumable components.
- rraghur 4y ago
  More likely flash degradation than any explicit code to insert delays
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    A normal user had better not see flash degradation. With the massive price per TB manufacturers charge for extra capacity, I expect ultra platinum quality.
MBCook 4y ago
In 2017 Apple introduced the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X. All three still get updates this year. That’s five years of support. They may get updated next year+, we don’t know yet. You know what the iPhone 8 had? 2GB of RAM. Same as Google is calling for now. And people have been through this over and over. Apple does not insert fake delays to make phones feel slower. If you could prove that you could make a mint. They add features, which takes extra CPU. Though not all are on every phone for that exact reason. How many Android phones from 5 years ago got 5 years of updates? How about 2 years?
- gpt5 4y ago
  Apple does throttle your phone when your battery degrades. They do it by default because it helps avoid situations where the phones would shut down completely before the battery empties. There was a class action on this, and now they allow you to toggle this feature off: https://www.itpro.com/mobile/battery-life/356946/how-to-turn-off-battery-throttling-on-iphone https://www.itpro.com/mobile/battery-life/356946/how-to-turn...
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Right. That was a real reason due to hardware issues, though the way they went about it was obviously received negatively (no notification and no option at first). It wasn’t fake delays just to push hardware sales, which is what people have been accusing them of for 10+ years.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      It must be insane being a manager at these megacorps. Imagine fixing a bug at work and accidentally kicking off a decade of bad press, memes, and legal issues because the fix was not communicated perfectly. I agree they should have explained to the user better, but imagine how many minor behind the scenes fixes they have to fix and can’t possibly bother the user with them all. I can see how these things slipped through.
      - 4y ago
RockingGoodNite 4y ago
It's funny I've been down voted for speaking my mind about observations I've made over years of using my current phone and the trend is true for my past android phones. I've had 3 other android phones. The last one, Nexus 6, I dropped and the gorilla glass cracked really bad, figured it was a loss and got my current LG phone and it has been great except for the suspicious slow downs which cannot be attributed to wear of the storage. I say that as someone who has been a technological person for 5 decades and a paid software engineer for almost 3 decades. The one before that, Nexus 4, the thing was charging on my desk, I looked over and saw it bulging like it was going to explode. The one before that, Nexus One, I still have, had to stop using it when the hard wired paltry amount of system space and increasing OS size made it unusable. Glad they stopped that practice of forcing the OS into a tiny space. I like my LG so it's too bad they got out of or announced they are leaving the phone business. I've traded several thousand of my dollars to Google for their phones since they started making them. I never owned iPhone, have no plans to either.
- aintmeit 4y ago
  Don't let the downvotes interfere with your rockin' good nite. But also please double down on explaining yourself. vroom vroom

scarface74 4y ago

For reference: those were the specs of the 2015 iPhone 6S/iPhone 6S Plus

kapitanjakc 4y ago
in 2015 2gigs ram in a phone was premium I think.. I had a cheap one from Xiaomi and was happy with 2gigs
MBCook 4y ago
It was also the spec of the iPhone 8, which gets iOS 16 this year and is thus considered fully supported. Seems reasonable on Google’s part to me.
- gpt5 4y ago
  Except that this article is about Android Go, which is a stripped down version of Android (with special, stripped down Google apps as well). iOS 16 on iPhone 8 would be the full experience (and would run much more smoothly than those 2GB Android Go phones).
mccorrinall 4y ago
A different reference: in 2011 my Xperia Arc S was running happily with 512MB RAM on Android 2.3
- scarface74 4y ago
  The iPhone 4S released in 2011 also had 512MB RAM and got its last security update in 2019
  - matyasrichter 4y ago
    And only got updated to iOS 9. Naturally, the minimum requirements for later version were greater than that.
Dylan16807 4y ago

metadat 4y ago

Android seems to be growing inferior to iOS in almost every way, which I find sad. I prefer to root for the underdog. * Privacy * Security * Efficiency I have a personal Android S22+ and an iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone gets better with every update, whereas there's always something funky going on with my droid. Every update does something weird, fixing one thing and breaking something new, and managing to offer no significant privacy improvements. In fact, today it is Samsung, the world's second largest phone vendor (outside of China), who is the one getting hit by data breaches, leaks, and hacks on an ongoing basis.

throwaway2056 4y ago
Did you install all the same apps that you have in S22+ in iPhone 13 mini? Likely not. Please do fair comparison. If you install 100 + apps in iPhone it is also terrible.
- metadat 4y ago
  Yes they have as many apps in common as possible. Both 256GB versions. The Android does get more use, but there's no denying the camera lag has been there since day one with the S22+. Previously I used (and still adore) the S10e. It's camera lag actually seemed slightly better than with the S22+, but still inferior to any recent iPhone (10x or newer).
Ninjinka 4y ago
I prefer to root the underdog
- andrew_ 4y ago
  Outstanding pun
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    Did people not understand that the lack of "for" in that sentence was a pun about rooting Android?

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

The sad thing is that even with 2GB an Android device can't reliably multitask without forcing background apps to sleep and purge data. Devs only testing on flagship phones means that a lesser pocket supercomputer results in unnecessarily poor performance.

kccqzy 4y ago
A lot of the issues related to multitask actually comes from OEM customizations. Many Android OEMs, especially Samsung, would make killing background apps more aggressive. Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  I have an Android One phone and it behaves just as badly. This is a fundamental systemic problem with core Android development. I dread system updates because I know some of the key apps (maps in particular) are going to have a worse experience than before.
- toast0 4y ago
  iOS does much better here because it started with apps only running while in the foreground and limited background processing has been added over time in specific cases. On the other hand, Android originally let apps do whatever, whenever, and has tried to rein that in over time, through 3rd party tools, manufacturer tools and changes to the OS; but it's so fragile, because apps don't always cleanly separate... And a lot of apps will try their hardest to wakeup and do something that's not really important whenever they can.
- Dunedan 4y ago
  I run AOSP and can confirm the claims of the parent comment. It's not just OEM customizations, Android itself got way more memory hungry in the past years. Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.
4y ago

stevespang 4y ago

lawgimenez 4y ago

I have been developing Android apps since Eclair, and I'm from a "developing" country. For me the deterioration of Android started after Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean for me is the best Android OS in history. So fast and fluid, it can run on the most low-end smartphones at that time. Developing for it was also very fun. Then I remember KitKat OS came and it was all hell broke loose. Every OEM was just releasing different Android versions here and there every year. And Google did nothing. They just let every smartphone company do what they want In my history of ~11 years of Android development, it's just hard to purchase a Google phone. I bought a Nexus tablet but I have to ask my sister in the US to ship it to me. The shipping fee is ridiculous high I remember. Then they introduced Pixel and Go editions but still I couldn't purchase officially from Google. I have to ask favor from someone in the US/EU to ship it to me.

roneythomas6 4y ago
I have used Jelly Bean both on S3 and Nexus 4. What I found is that Jelly Bean gets really slow after a while and you need to factory reset every couple of months. Newer versions of Android don't have this issue.
- danuker 4y ago
  A factory reset unapplies all updates. But for instance, Chrome will auto-update even without you being logged into a Google account.
  - roneythomas6 4y ago
    Factory reset on android can only reset the apps to the version of the app that came with the OS release. It doesn't revert any OS updates. Also all apps are updated by Google Play as long as you're logged in and haven't disabled auto-update.
    - danuker 4y ago
      Android 5 did revert my Chrome. Sites worked faster for a while on my very old device.

hahnchen 4y ago

Does this also apply to android installed on smart devices? I doubt they have those specs

aasasd 4y ago

I mean, with 2 GB of memory you'll only be able to use the phone as an ebook reader anyway—and I don't mean PDF because scrolling is gonna be a bitch, what with incessant garbage collection in the background. As for storage, for me Android 11 occupies 17 GB of it.

rektide 4y ago

Title appears wrong. The past two year requirememt was 1GB and that has been raised to 2GB. Not more than. There's some decent bints about how to use the platform effectively here. onTrimMemory is something most apps probably just dont do. Knowing when and how to use mmap to access resources is obvious to folks with some systems backgrounds, but we'd be lucky if that's half of mobile developers. In general it's just really easy to build badly behaved apps anywhere, on any platform. Seeing the magnitude of resources we're using & seeing problems develop is something mentioned in the article, but so often requires fairly expensive paid observability tools & a team that knows & has capacity & backing to care & spend the time. Most orgs care way too much about shipping features that pad their resume; few get promoted for keeping software in good shape.

Mikeb85 4y ago

And? That's typical specs from 9 years ago...

greggman3 4y ago

It's kind of insane to me that my phone (Android or iOS) requires 2GB of ram and 16GB of storage given that in 1995 my WindowsNT 4.0 PC with 128Meg of ram and maybe 2gb HD ran 3DStudio Max to render 3D effects and movies and and ran Photoshop and MS Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and now it takes 2GB to just write messages, and share photos :P

unethical_ban 4y ago
Did your 95 computer use ML for photo post processing, or have 120hz display, or have 200 processes running at a time? Why are you pretending 1995 is like today?
- greggman3 4y ago
  I'm not. But my iPhone can't run an app as sophisticated as 3DSMax and it doesn't multitask to the same level as that 1995 machine.
  - govg 4y ago
    Your iPhone can run apps far more sophisticated than anything 3dsmax could do 27 years ago.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      It can in theory, I practice not really.
    - diffeomorphism 4y ago
      So why doesn't it?
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    3DSMax from 1995 could probably run emulated in iOS Safari.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

PieUser 4y ago

What's wrong with that?

jimrandomh 4y ago

It wouldn't make sense for the operating system alone to consume 2GB RAM/16GB storage, but an Android version number also represents a compatibility level for apps and handsets. If an app developer tests their app on Android 13 but doesn't test it on older Android versions, they probably aren't testing on low-RAM devices, either. And if a consumer buys a handset after checking only the Android version number, and doesn't check details like the RAM and storage, they'll probably be find out that apps which they expected to work don't work, and be quite unhappy.

roneythomas6 4y ago
Android version number for a app developer is only for API compatibility. It doesn't ensure memory or storage. The above minimum memory and storage is for OEM's so they can ensure new version of Android can run properly on their devices.

MBCook 4y ago

I don’t follow the Android world, so I’m out of my depth. I saw this announcement but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Is it just that it makes it hard/impossible to make super cheap Android phones by raising the minimum BoM? 2GB is the minimum RAM for iOS 16 as well, so this doesn’t seem crazy. If they said 4GB or 6GB I would understand better.

scarface74 4y ago
But the cheapest iOS device is $429. You can find cheap unsubsidized Android phones for less than $100.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
2GB is also the minimum RAM for Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS. I think what people are wondering is how the much more constrained application environment on a phone has become that demanding of system resources?
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  > Windows 10 (64-bit x86) and that's a full fledged desktop OS with much more capability than a smartphone OS Given all the fancy things phones can do nowaydays, talk to satellites, crash detection, gyroscopes, GPS, all in a tiny form factor while managing battery life and a massively powerful camera, I'd argue desktop has maybe less capability than a smartphone OS
  - blep_ 4y ago
    All of those things are implemented as dedicated hardware, though. There is no GPS process looping and reading individual bits out of the air to assemble them into GPS packets. People regularly do all of these things on tiny microcontrollers with no OS.

helf 4y ago

Android has been a mess for awhile and it isn’t getting better. A lot of bullshit is being done for “security” which will just end up recreating some of the sandboxed nightmares from iOS. The enforcement of Scoped Storage with Android 13 it going to essentially recreate the nightmare of file management that is iOS. It’s really frustrating how Google has to slowly screw up damn near everything they create.

lenkite 4y ago

Wow! - A 4x increase in minimum memory over just 5 years. And it appears that they are desperately fighting memory leaks. Maybe the Android Team should consider a "Rewrite to Rust" project, introduce a better designed API for native apps and market an "Android Yoga".

dapids 4y ago
You think moving to rust will reduce the memory footprint?? Interesting viewpoint...
- lenkite 4y ago
  It is well accepted that GC-based runtimes greatly increase memory footprint. A tracing GC might need upto several times the memory to match manual memory management. Nothing interesting about the "viewpoint". https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performance.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...
  - dapids 4y ago
    I think you missed the sarcasm in my post. I was not at all serious and completely subscribe to everything you just mentioned
dangus 4y ago
Is that a lot? Smartphones were in their infancy until very recently. I think 2GB is entirely reasonable, especially because the Android ecosystem doesn't require the latest OS version to be a commercially viable and usable phone. Windows 98 required 16MB of RAM, Windows XP required 4x more (64MB) and it was released just 3 years later. I can see some Android phones with 2GB of RAM that cost under $100.

zaptheimpaler 4y ago

Oh no they want phones made in 2022 to have a whole 2GB of RAM! So that consumers can expect a certain baseline level of responsiveness and performance on any Android phone unlike the fragmented mess now. so evil omg fuck google!!111 i hate technology take me back to Nokia 3300!!!!! I used to be young and free and hot :( :( :(

Gigachad 4y ago
Pretty accurate satire on most of the threads on this site. People just see “Google” in the headline and start frothing with rage. Anything but the latest Rust encrypted notes app gets strangely hate filled threads.
- forchune3 4y ago
  hating google is not strange

bluSCALE4 4y ago

I was rummaging through my things and found two Samsung S3's. One wouldn't charge and one had a missing screen. The one that didn't charge was mine and it has Cyanogen Mod, likely a nightly build. I may have modified the partitions as well but alas couldn't use it. So I swapped out the boards and boom, a working phone from 2013-2014. Batteries still held a decent charge. Point is, I remembered that custom mod and it was great. I believe for everyday use, the battery didn't last but all in all, it was an amazing phone and OS build. I really miss those days.

TekMol 4y ago

I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again. Compare that to writing web apps. You open an empty text file in a text editor and are ready to go.

sofixa 4y ago
> I have been developing software for over a decade. I wanted to give Android apps a try too. But when I tried to install the tooling, it was all so heavy and bloated and clunky that I gave up and never tried again At least it's cross-platform and it doesn't require you to buy special hardware like the main mobile competitor does.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  Main mobile competitor in US
  - jjcon 4y ago
    Are there countries where there is another main competitor? iOS is at like 30% global market share isn’t it (a bit higher in North America, uk, and some Asian countries like japan, lower elsewhere) I’m not aware of anywhere having a larger competitor to android though.
ismayilzadan 4y ago
I had a complete opposite experience a few weeks ago. It took me about an hour max to install Android Studio in Manjaro, install SDKs, spin up Android VM, pull open source Android keyboard app and add my own customised layout, then test it in VM and install to my phone. There were no errors at all. Just clicking buttons and waiting. -edit: typo
- ris58h 4y ago
  What opensource keyboard app was it?

jokoon 4y ago

Wirth's law strikes again.

davidkuennen 4y ago

I don't get what's wrong with this at all. At some point you have to up the specs. And 2GB RAM + 16GB storage doesn't feel out of place at all. Rather low for any phone from the past 5 to 10 years.

gpt5 4y ago
This is Android Go, which is a stripped down version of Android with more limited Google Apps. iOS 16 will work fully (and smoothly) on devices with 2GB of RAM like the iPhone 8.
- cma 4y ago
  I think maybe they only think it works well because the iOS crash reporter won't even keep your forms filled out if you switch back to the other app to check on the error and have only 2GB of RAM. Each app has to persist its state when backgrounded and they didn't even bother for the crash reporter/feedback app.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Ridiculous bloat.

nazgulsenpai 4y ago

These Apple vs Google conversations on HN remind me of console wars on old forums or even the modern US political discourse. Everyone picks their team and relentlessly defends or attacks the other team whenever possible, when both teams want all of your money and to lock you in perpetually.

jmartin2683 4y ago

Android is a slow motion train wreck.

DesiLurker 4y ago

it used to be Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away now it is Qualcomm giveth and Google taketh away. Seriously tho we even had palmOS and WindowsCE running on 2 decades old arm cores and now we cannot run linux properly on multi-billion transistor gigahertz cores!

jeremycarter 4y ago
Bring back the Windows Phone!

mproud 4y ago

Misleading; 2 GB/16 GB or more.

mancerayder 4y ago

What in the world provoked Android to forcefeed a feature that auto-predicts a reply and make it pop up as a notification quick reply? Example: do you want to hang out later? someone sends me. Android offers: "Sure" and "I don't think so". I'm much more likely to hit the wrong thing by accident - when I never use either of these "shortcuts." My google-foo is awful: I spent time looking for ways to turn it off for Signal but all the search results don't seem to apply to my version of Android and Signal (all the latest, and a Pixel). I had trouble even figuring out what's that called (eventually I discovered it's called Smart Reply). And typing is awful. It seems easier to type on the iPhone. And the battery life in ALL my pixels is always almost exactly 12 months before massive denigration, without fail. I leave it plugged in overnight every day, so that could be why. Someone please give me an excuse to move to an iPhony.

batmanturkey 4y ago

Bloated software sells more hardware