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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is that even with 2GB an Android device can't reliably multitask without forcing background apps to sleep and purge data. Devs only testing on flagship phones means that a lesser pocket supercomputer results in unnecessarily poor performance.

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A lot of the issues related to multitask actually comes from OEM customizations. Many Android OEMs, especially Samsung, would make killing background apps more aggressive.

Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com/

I have an Android One phone and it behaves just as badly. This is a fundamental systemic problem with core Android development. I dread system updates because I know some of the key apps (maps in particular) are going to have a worse experience than before.

iOS does much better here because it started with apps only running while in the foreground and limited background processing has been added over time in specific cases. On the other hand, Android originally let apps do whatever, whenever, and has tried to rein that in over time, through 3rd party tools, manufacturer tools and changes to the OS; but it's so fragile, because apps don't always cleanly separate... And a lot of apps will try their hardest to wakeup and do something that's not really important whenever they can.

I run AOSP and can confirm the claims of the parent comment. It's not just OEM customizations, Android itself got way more memory hungry in the past years.

Regularly I can't even have two apps running at once without one of them being force unloaded and that's with all the "battery optimizations" disabled, because without it's even worse.

2 GB is straight out unusable, as long as you need switching between apps like the browser or the maps and other apps.

I had to upgrade a couple of years ago.

I think it's not just the OS, but the apps themselves, and even the web pages just got more resource-hungry.

> lesser pocket supercomputer

Love it

I had to jump in and comment, because "pocket glass supercomputer" has been one of my favorite personal (or so I thought, until now) neologisms.

It tickles me to think that there are others who think about (and name) smartphones this way :)

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