Gadgetory

hey there my name's Gary Sims and this is android authoritative the humble beginnings of android you'll find smartphones with quite small amounts of RAM quite small amounts of memory maybe 512 megabytes maybe 1 gigabyte and then over the years that kind of number has started to rise slowly 2 gigabytes 3 gigabytes 4 gigabytes in flagship devices really was quite popular for a couple of years but now we've got to the point where memory is kind of going out of control we had 6 gigabytes and 8 gigabytes and now people talk about 10 gigabyte devices probably we're gonna see 12 gigabyte devices so how come we've gone from these humble beginnings right up to these very very large amounts of memory is it just spec Wars is one camera just trying to beat another just on the specification sheet or actually do you need that amount of memory well I've done some experimentation I've done some investigation and I want to look at how much memory do you actually need in your Android smartphone so if you want to find out more please they mix playing so the first thing to mention is I've just published a video over at the Gary explains channel which talks about the technical details of how Android deals with its RAM what does it do when you try to launch an app and there's no space left in RAM for that app to actually occupy now I'll go into all the technical detail over there but the bottom line is is that some other app will have to be kicked out of RAM to make room for the new app and what that means is if you're scrolling through the recent apps screen if you tap on an app that's actually still in memory it would have come up instantaneously and Carol exactly where it left off however if you tap on an app that actually been kicked out of RAM then that app will load up from the beginning you might see kind of the splash screen as it loads and it will try to resume exactly where it was but maybe in some cases like in a game it won't be able to resume exactly where it was it will maybe take it to the beginning of that level or something like that so there is a disadvantage to having apt kind of kicked out of RAM because it does affect your user experience ever so slightly having said that there is a point where having so much RAM doesn't really change the user experience I mean it kind of unreasonable to say hey I launched this app three months ago and I've never rebooted my phone when I tapped on it in the recent apps list it reloaded it from the disk that's outrageous I wanted it to stay in memory for three months well clearly that's not what we want either so we do is look at how much RAM do you actually need do that when you look at two things first we're going to see how much RAM and actual app takes a second if when you see how much RAM is available on some of the popular Android devices okay so let's start by looking at apps now when you load an app from the internal storage and it come of comes up onto the screen it takes up some RAM in your Android device so a standard app in Android takes about 300 megabytes of RAM so if you think about you know Google Play itself or Spotify or candy crush you know YouTube simple apps like this some of course take slightly less some take slightly more I did a kind of an experiment looking at a lot of the popular apps and the average about 300 megabytes so that would mean that if you had for example a theoretical phone with let's say one gigabyte of available memory that could actually take three of those apps in memory simultaneously without any problem in fact once you include swapping which I deal with in that video on the Garrick special that might be bumped up to let's say a fourth app simultaneously in memory but there are of course other types of apps for example if you have a media intensive app that say something like Instagram or Gmail things that are kind of loading up different you know pieces of data photographs the Google Photos app for example these kind of apps can take a lot more space because every one of those photos even though it's a thumbnail needs to be stored in memory and you want it accessible quick as you're scrolling you want all these pictures to appear so those kind of apps can take maybe up to 500 maybe 600 megabytes of RAM so that would mean if you were kind of using Google photos then you might be able to also have candy crush and let's say Google Play and Spotify also all in memory at the same time but that Google photo ass has taken up more of the available memory and then after that you've got some very heavy intensive apps and these are mainly games if you look at games like for example Need for Speed no limits or pub G or asphalt 9 then all of these apps might take 809 under even a gigabyte of RAM so if you go back to our theoretical one gigabyte available memory one game like Need for Speed can take up all that memory in one go and all those other apps you had you know Google Play and Twitter and all that all get kicked out of memory to make room for that one app it's also worth mentioning that Google Chrome falls into that it's kind of heavy usage category because as you're opening up different tabs as you're loading up web pages themselves have got images in them actually the amount of space that Google Chrome can use with three or four open tabs can easily go over nine hundred megabytes towards one gigabyte so in thinking about how much RAM you need you need to think about what kind of apps you use do you run games like fortnight and pub G and Need for Speed if you do then your RAM use is gonna be much higher than somebody who really just kind of uses Spotify and Twitter and then occasionally read some emails and goes into Instagram they're very two different categories of users and the demands that you place on your smartphone are very different they said there's some popular Android devices to see how much installed RAM they have and how much available RAM they have which can of course be used by apps so I've got here a while way mate eight that I've had for a couple of years it's a three gigabyte device and that has 1.3 gigabytes of available memory and it's using 512 megabytes of zared Ram compression again go and see that gary explains video if you want to know what that means now a device that the pixel 3xl comes with four gigabytes of that 1.7 gigabytes is the available memory and it's using one gigabyte of zed ram and the device like the Galaxy Note 8 and the galaxy note 9 both have 6 gigabytes of RAM now the note 8 will have about 2 seven gigabyte of available memory and a 2.5 gigabyte zedd ram space whereas the note 9 will have about 3.5 gigabytes of available memory and a 2 gigabyte zedd ram and then of course we come to the 1 plus 6 now 1 plus or one of the companies that have always been pushing high amounts of ram so it gives you 8 gigabytes of ram the McLaren Edition gives you 10 gigabytes of RAM now in the 8 gigabyte version then you get 5 gigabytes of available memory after a reboot and there is 0z ram you so there's 0 swapping available on the 1 plus 60 i know we have those numbers it really just a case of doing the maths plus a little bit of leeway because of the idea of swapping so if you've got 1 point 7 gigabytes of available memory like you do on the pixel 3xl well that means you can get 5 apps in memory simultaneously when the apps are around 300 megabytes of occupancy each if you then stick in a big game for example like a Need for Speed well that's gonna take away a gigabyte then the other 700 megabytes will can be used by 2 or 3 apps like you know Google Play and Spotify and YouTube without you having to restart any apps at all but with 4 gigabytes of memory even though you can happily switch between half a dozen apps or so you can even put in a big game in there and still have enough memory to switch between a couple of apps some users find that over time because really they are using more than just 2 or 3 apps they might have maybe six seven eight ten twelve apps they use regularly to do you know the weather and the news and the email and by time you start running all those different things then they're gonna find they are gonna find app restarts happening quite frequently now if you move over to some of the devices with 6 gigabytes of RAM here we can see already that we're talking about 2.5 gigabytes or 3 gigabytes of available memory and that would mean literally you can run like a big game like Need for Speed still have 2 gigabytes of memory available which means you can kind of a load and then all your app that Spotify and Twitter and Gmail and Instagram and you'll still have plenty of room in there and on top of that you've got the idea of the swapping using the SRAM so really at this stage in 2019 six gigabytes is the start of the sweet point because here really you can switch between apps quite freely even some very big apps and you're not really gonna see an app restart very often and then we get on to devices with eight gigabytes for example at the oneplus 60 and there you've got like five gigabytes of available memory so the sweet spot here really does continue because you can run like you know Need for Speed & fortnight and Instagram and Gmail and a whole bunch you know ten or twelve other smaller apps all at the same time and they can all stay in RAM and you can switch between them seamlessly however this really is the upper end of the sweet spot and kind of I would challenge people who use phones with six gigabytes and eight gigabytes to see if they really could see the difference inside this sweet spot you know is there really much of a user difference from my testing and from my day to day usage I have a six gigabyte note 8 I don't see much of a difference between 16 bytes and 8 gigabytes but they are both part of this nice sweet spot however once you go beyond 8 gigabytes to 10 gigabytes and 212 and who knows 16 gigabytes really now we are entering into the land of mr. silly who of course if you've read any of the mr. men books lives in nonsense land and this really is a place where it really is quite stupid because you don't need to hold you know fortnight and pub G and needs the speed and and then who else knows whatever apps all in memory all at the same time so that an app you started you know a month ago when you switched to it in the recent apps it's still there so really more than 8 gigabytes I think personally is really quite ridiculous actually if you translate that through to let's say the desktop and the laptop world well I have a laptop with 8 gigabytes my car and run Premiere Pro and Photoshop and lots of other things on it and it works absolutely fine and the idea that my smartphone would need more RAM than my desktop on my laptop really quite ridiculous now we need to put in a couple of caveats here because I can see some of your already seizing and you want to jump down to the comments and start writing something well let's just put in a couple of caveats here first of all it does depend on which phone you are actually using I have talked generically about four gigabytes and six gigabytes and eight gigabytes and an eval of available RAM there are some OEMs who put some quite heavy-handed app killers in their version of Android so you switch the phone off you put asleep leave it on the desk and when you come back thirty minutes ladies even though you've got all that available memory they've been killed off I know that in my mate eight for example in the first few weeks that I had it I certainly spent quite a lot of time going into the settings and there's a whitelist where you can say don't kill this app and I actually had to go through putting in there the apps that I use most frequently because they were being killed off even though there was actually free RAM available so some OEMs do mistakenly kill off apps in the background and then you switch to them and you only has them open like an hour ago and you haven't got that much running and they've been killed off and that can be a problem but that's not to do with the amount of RAM you've got in your smartphone that's purely the firmware that the OEM has put in there and they've configured it wrongly and that's something you need to watch out for and the second thing I'd like to say is that it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't buy a phone with let's say ten gigabytes of RAM because maybe that phone is good for other reasons so for example if a really good smartphone came out now which has got the best camera and it's got the best display and it's got the best battery life and it's offering you know the best online services then really the fact that it comes with ten gigabytes shouldn't you shouldn't say oh I'm not going to buy that because that's just stupid if it's good for the other reasons then just accept the ten gigabytes what it is but personally I would like to see consumers boycotting devices with anything more than eight gigabytes in them because really it's unreasonable all it is is just a spec war between 100 a.m. and another om it raises the prices reduces the quality because they're trying to squeeze in more stuff for less money and really isn't worth it but if you do find a perfect phone that happens to have that amount of memory well they would have to accept it but really it's not necessary eight gigabytes max is all you're gonna need certainly for 2019 I would gather also for 2020 really this has to stop this kind of battle between these companies just has to stop because it's not worth it and it's just stupid and the final caveat to put in of course is it does depend on your usage as I have mentioned if you are just a person who uses kind of the standard apps that take 300 400 megabytes then you know 4 gigabytes 6 gigabytes you may even better get away with 3 or 2 gigabytes in your use it's going to be absolutely fine if your device is well tuned other people who will do nothing but switch between five different online games that each take up 1 gigabyte of memory and he wants to be kind of or she wants to be switching between these you know they're playing for tonight then they play Need for Speed and they're playing something else and they're playing it well okay in that case then you might need more memory but kind of if we come down to the medium space here of what you know and there's a large wide media space of what a lot of people do those are extreme cases for ok you can live with it 6 to 8 is a sweet spot anything more than 8 is really just too much but your situation of course may be different ok so there you have it my name is Gary Sims this is Android or thority I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to the and or authority YouTube channel don't forget to go over to the Gary explains YouTube channel to look at that video on how Android memory management works and of course don't forget to go into and/or Authority calm ok that's it I'll see in the next one