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I hate Android! (swg-empire.de)

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!

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[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] Naich@piefed.world 44 points 2 days ago

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?"

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 10 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] schwim@piefed.zip 56 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

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

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

the question is: why do two, not even three, apps consume all of the 4gb?

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

The operating system has to use that RAM too.

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[-] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Title correction: "I hate default settings!"

[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 17 hours ago

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.

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[-] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[-] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

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

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

ah today’s young ones…

Thanks.

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[-] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 27 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Thatuserguy@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago

If your lemmy client is Voyager, its not an Android only issue. Happens on iOS as well.

[-] atrielienz@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

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[-] VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 17 points 2 days ago

Mishandling an OOM killer event is generally speaking developer error.

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Funny, I switched to Android because iOS was doing shit like this.

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[-] ryantown@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Agree about Disclosure Day – what a letdown.

Disagree about Android, but that does suck.

[-] testaccount789@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] TVA@thebrainbin.org 7 points 2 days ago

I've got 16GB of RAM in mine and it'll still kill my podcast/music/audiobook app that's actively playing content ... I've never had it kill my mBin app though (Interstellar), so, I guess that's nice.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel.

In which world is 4GB enough to multitask a web browser under any OS?

[-] SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 2 days ago

You're right. I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn't get anything done.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn’t get anything done.

Try to get a modern web browser working on your Win98 machine. The problem is modern web browsers eating RAM, not Android.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 5 points 2 days ago

Found the Chromium dev!

But seriously, I've got an old laptop still in use and that's getting along fine on 4 GB. Firefox, KDE, Libre Office, background tasks, some light gaming, no problem.

Usually good programs only take lots of memory when it's available.

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[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I feel like this might be the wrong community for this

Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android

[-] amio@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] ascendings@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago

I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)

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Honestly, the state of mobile OSs is quite sad. Everything is locked down, it's a duopoly of shit and shittier, and the Linux alternative just isn't daily driver worthy for the vast majority of users. And that's not because the development isn't going well - it's because phones have so much more proprietary shit that needs drivers, and that's if you can even unlock the bootloader in the first place, otherwise you're SOL.

[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 17 hours ago

ironically google's pixel lineup is one of the best options available, i've been using that for many years now and it's so fucking easy to install lineage on them.

[-] Mk23simp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 days ago

In the version I have (on my Samsung A37) I can exempt certain apps from power management. So that's nice.

I still have some complaints about it, but that particular issue has an answer at least.

[-] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I know I’ll get some hate here but never have I run into this sort of issue on IOS even going back to when I got my first new iPhone 4 in 2010. I will say IOS 26 sucked when it launched, but now it’s running pretty well on my 13 mini after all the updates.

[-] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 7 points 2 days ago

Yes it's a very stupid memory management meant to improve battery life by killing any app thats been running at all...

Very frustrating and idiot.

Try play any game nowadays.... The instant you switch away bam, killed.

It's baked into android. AOSP I mean, any and all android flavours.

Disabling optimization for battery doesn't help with any bigger app.

[-] Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't love Android either and would be much happier back on iOS but with everything happening in tech I'll use Graphene until the seas look a bit smoother

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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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