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!
Sorry to hear that
Nah. Thats just because the world decided your opinion was shit and didnt need to be shared. Yet here you are sharing it anyway.
Are you alright?
Funny, I switched to Android because iOS was doing shit like this.
Yeah, that one is even worse.
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.
I’ve got 8GB and I’ve never had this problem 🤷♂️
I had 8gb in my previous phone and ran into this issue very often. It’s not inherent to android, but rather the rom the phone is running. As others have said, this can be fixed by tweaking some settings yourself.
I feel like this might be the wrong community for this
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
OP uses 4GB RAM but blames the OS.
And he’s right with that.
Android blew up with Kitkat (4.2) but even then, in 2020 was 6 GB much.
One of the problems is the only official IDE (Android Studio) stuffing every imagibable compatibility library in the apps, because dependency resolution is too hard for them (which is also because of how the OS is structured).
Btw, when i did Android app dev in 2021, i was astounded, that there’s MaterialUI and whatnot, but you still had to implement every little detail (button size, dark mode, etc) manually. I guess that’s the web dev generation; they don’t know it different.
Android does need a lot of ram these days especially if you are running stock
I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking. Chances are they are have a ton of background stuff running and are using apps that use lots of memory
I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking.
A couple of months ago I revived an old x86 tablet using postmarketOS. No Android anywhere. The only somewhat usable browser I could find was Falkon. Firefox was absolutely unusable. Ungoogled Chromium was a bit better but overall still shitty. Opening a second tab under Falkon was too much as well. The problematic component was 100% the web browser and there Firefox specifically. OP writes that he opened Firefox and I can confirm from my own experience of using Firefox on a RAM constrained non-Android device that FF is terrible in such scenarios. FF is great otherwise but not when RAM is low.
Android probably would’ve been a slightly better experience as it is designed to work in low ram scenarios. However it still would’ve been slow as hell.
Running what is effectively desktop Firefox on a system not necessarily designed for mobile is not going to play well with low ram at all
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
the question is: why do two, not even three, apps consume all of the 4gb?
The operating system has to use that RAM too.
yes i know that obviously. But what do modern oses do more than they did with the memory limitations back then? They serve you more ads and they convince that taking up literally half of your memory and not even leaving enough resources for two apps is somehow necessary, when older computers hosted the os and the apps comfortably in a tiny fraction of that.
No, they do a lot more behind the scenes, running far more useful and necessary services.
Older computers couldn’t do as much as modern computers either.
Also the thing that almost no one send to have mentioned is that computers are multitaskers. People using a computer use multiple programs all at once while they’re all in focus. On phones that’s not the case unless you’re using a foldable or split screen, in which case it keeps those apps alive indefinitely without refreshing/closing. A phone is otherwise one app at a time, and any app that you haven’t used for a few minutes will get suspended so it doesn’t go back to the old days of Android’s battery life being absolutely atrocious due to apps running “full speed” in the background.
read the op’s complaint. And all those extra services shouldn’t need gb of ram anyway.
”shouldn’t need fb of ram anyway”
Says who? Based on what?
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.
Title correction: “I hate default settings!”
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.
Adding, I disabled all background access to all of the programs I don’t regularly use / expect to return to.
Only like 5 apps have any background access and they never get auto-cleared.
Between that and GOS letting me block network access to apps that really shouldn’t need it, my battery lasts for days.
I don’t love Android either and would be much happier back on iOS but with everything happening to tech I’ll use Graphene until the seas look a bit smoother
Ugh, don’t get me started on iOS. Wanted to copy some files onto my daughter’s iPad and discovered that it stops the copy operation when you click on the folder that’s being copied. Maybe even when you click anywhere, didn’t dare test that.
I just wish Nokia had open sourced Maemo. That had everything you need fully working.
nokia did open source maemo and it’s still being developed by the community. look up on maemo leste. unfortunately they only support very few phones, including the nokia n900, motorola droid 4 xt894 and the original pinephone.
really hoping i can daily drive that os at some point on some modern powerful hardware
I thought Maemo Leste was a reimplementation effort and not a continuation.
If you hate Android you’d definitely hate iPhone… at least in Android you can fiddle in the options menus to stop this from happening to the apps you care about. Not iPhone. It’s basically pure randomness
If I were to rant about iOS devices it would be in !actually_infuriating@lemmy.world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
If your lemmy client is Voyager, its not an Android only issue. Happens on iOS as well.
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.
Mishandling an OOM killer event is generally speaking developer error.
To me it looks like sometimes Android is sending KILL instead of TERM. because sometimes it works like it should and sometimes it doesn’t. Not just with the one app.
If it’s an open source app, you could test what’s happening in
onSaveInstanceStateandonCreatewithsavedInstanceState/onRestoreInstanceState, maybe by attaching some tracing to it.
