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What do we need 4GB RAM smartphones for?

4 points by replete ↗ HN
I've been looking to replace my Nexus 4, a 2012 android handset with 2GB RAM. It has always been swift, but more recently with software updates - buggy. I don't feel like the bugs are down to exceeding the 2GB of RAM.

Phones like the Oneplus2 are now shipping with 4GB DDR4 RAM. Beyond the obvious marketing gimmick - is there software waiting for more RAM that are yet to see on our phones?

Curious to know if anyone has anything to share on this.

8 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] thread
benologist
2,097,152K ought to be enough for anybody?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syste...

Exceeding 2gb of ram in your desktop 10 years ago had limited benefits, now that's about a minimum computers ship with and even 4gb can be insufficient.

More memory and better processors makes phones more useful to the extent they are now trending towards becoming full-featured desktop computers themselves, the extra ram isn't for "today's app ecosystem" it's breathing space against a more demanding generation of apps and usage.

replete
I'm kind of with you on this. 6-8GB RAM for modern development has been more than enough for most requirements for at least 5 years. From my point of view, 2GB on an android smartphone seems to be a similar amount.

Some interesting points raised above about heaps.

allendoerfer
You need them, because people want to write text editors in JavaScript. It is basically like fashion. The customer does not want highly optimized and functioning things but new shiny stuff.

A less cynical man would say, that performance gains in the lower levels frees the developer to optimize the UI/UX.

Zigurd
Android has maximum heap sizes that are vastly smaller than total RAM. They can be as small as 16MB. 32MB is common. Browsers do get special treatment in some configurations. But, still, Android is designed to keep many runtime instances happy together in memory. Large in-memory data models don't work well in Android.

Therefore the value of large RAM is limited. Samsung makes their maximum heap sizes extraordinarily large, but that just makes bloatware bloatier.

If you want a big, complex software system on Android, break it up into multiple runtime instances, e.g. a shared data model in a ContentProvider component, and a suite of apps built around it. It you have a gigantic app and you are trying to do a straight port from iOS, you're going to have a bad time.

wodenokoto
I thought it was for keeping multiple apps and web history in memory.
TheSpiceIsLife
Something that annoys me about my iPhone 4S is the almost constant app-refreshes for anything that isn't a really simple app. Safari will even close in the background, stopping streaming music, if I open another resource-hogging app. I think I read this is due to the phone only 1GB RAM, anyone know if this is correct? The iPhone 6 still only has 1GB.

Is this, or something similar, also a problem on Android?

replete
Android is real multi-tasking, iOS isn't quite the same as there are background services for apps.

It's also how Apple get away with much less RAM.

dpc_pw
My desktop has 32GB, and if I could I would have more. Why? Because RAM is always useful. Caching in RAM is such a nice feature, speeding up your daily work-flow.

Same thing applies in the phone. IMO, the biggest RAM increase drive is graphics and UI. With 1080p screens things are getting big: textures, icons, UI elements, photos, videos, etc...

And why would we artificially constrain ourselves? If the current manufacturing process makes 4GB feasible or even cost efficient, than it makes sense to use this size.