Why do you need RAM? In addition to ensuring the operation of the operating system, it is responsible for maintaining applications that are running in the background. It is thanks to the RAM that you can launch several programs, and then switch between them in real time, continuing the execution of the started tasks from the moment at which you stopped. The more RAM, the more applications the smartphone can simultaneously hold in the background. Therefore, manufacturers continue to increase the RAM, not wanting to stop even at 16 GB. But the devices Huawei will have a lot and 6 GB.
Applications are unloaded from memory for a reason
I have already said that I never forcibly unload applications from the background, because I do not see any point in this. Despite the fact that the energy saving function on Android supposedly works less efficiently than on iOS, in reality it is not. It doesn't matter how many applications are running in the background – 5, 10, 15 or 25 – the smartphone will not discharge faster, because a special system mechanism will simply freeze them and prevent energy consumption when idle. But it turned out that everything is not quite as I thought.
Applications running in the background
iOS never unloads applications, but Android – how
I recently decided to do an experiment to find out how many applications my Honor View 20 with 6GB of RAM can hold in memory at the same time. I launched 30 programs, poked buttons in each of them to simulate at least some activity and load RAM, and then returned to the first. To my surprise, it continued to work and showed no signs of wanting to reboot. Then I randomly checked the remaining apps and found that they worked too. I was so inspired that I even wrote a post about why smartphones need so much RAM. But the next day I was disappointed.
Most of the apps I ran for the experiment just disappeared from the multitasking menu. After all, if iOS, when it lacks RAM, simply reloads the application, then here it is as if someone purposefully unloaded the applications. Of course, no outsider could do this, which means that either I – and I am sure of myself – did it, or the smartphone itself. The answer was obvious. This was done by the power-saving mechanism of my Honor View 20, which thought that so many applications running in the background could provoke premature discharge. That is why my smartphone did not run out of power when I launched several dozen programs – it just unloaded them from memory when I forgot.
Why applications are unloaded
On the left is OnePlus with 46% of the apps remaining in the background, and on the right is the Google Pixel with 100% of the remaining apps
Analysis of the situation showed that unloading applications from memory against the will of the users themselves occurs on smartphones of many brands. It would be more accurate to say on smartphones of all brands, except for the Google Pixel. It's just that the standard power saving mechanisms conflict with the Doze mechanism, which Google presets to Android, and this leads to unloading applications from the background. It seems to the standard firmware mechanism that Doze is not doing enough efficiently, and therefore it simply takes and closes most of the programs, leaving only 3-5, at best 7.
Of course, this is a bug that interferes with the normal operation of the smartphone and does not allow it to reach its full potential, but which no one is going to fix for many years. It seems that manufacturers deliberately refuse to adapt their energy saving mechanism to the peculiarities of Doze functioning, so that they conflict with each other. But, in this case, all meaning is lost even from using 6 GB of RAM, not to mention 8, 12, and even more so 16 GB. Why are they needed if the smartphone will still unload everything and leave only the standard software working?