Google forces Android apps to use memory more wisely as RAMpocalypse rages

Google has declared that Android apps distributed through Google Play will have to meet new memory performance thresholds, starting in early 2027. Google is cracking down on poorly optimized code that might otherwise squander what's now a precious commodity, as RAM prices skyrocket and consumers choose phones with leaner specs …

[just4this]

I’ll hazard a guess....

that meeting those requirements would be quite easy.

Simply ship the app minus all the monitor n’ slurp bloat most come with.

[frankvw]

I feel old when I remember the time when designing your programs to save RAM was the norm. A ZX81 with 1k RAM, anyone? Doing things like XOR AX, AX instead of LD AX,0 to save a byte of RAM was what you did back then. Now you can't boot Windows in less than 4GB, but if you want it to do anything useful you need twice that. Kids these days...

[just4this]

You had RAM and a processor?

Luxury……

Cue The Four Yorkshiremen gags.

[Headley_Grange]

Four Yorkshiremen? We only had three Yorkshiremen when I were a kid.

[sedregj]

You could afford three Yorkshiremen? Luxury! The tight-fisted buggers would ... blah blah blah ... whippet, pidgeon fancying ... flat cap ...

... we could only afford a quarter Yorkie, on sale or return and we had to buy them a shoe box in middle of t' road (no idea what t' means but they do insist on it, perhaps it means tea - who knows)

[Anonymous Coward]

1K is so small, it's not so much RAM as a LAMB.

[David 132]

It was the baaaaad old days.

[G.Y.]

Drun//disk

I cut my teeth on a Wegematic (similar to ALWAC); memory was disk, with 4 fixed-head tracks. Optimization, which I never understood, was about putting the next instruction at the point the disk.drum would go next.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Drun//disk

One of the things I did as a comp tech in the 1980s was experimentally-determining the best interleave and skew offset of each of tbe computer system/hard disc/hard drive controller combos we sold.

[Anonymous Coward]

COSMAC ELF SBC / RCA CDP1802

The base-model kit COSMAC ELF single-board computer had 256 BYTES of RAM, no monitor, but some circuitry which let you load machine-language programs directly into RAM from the hex keyboard and run them.

A friend had one of these, and we had an anazing amount fun with it!

The first personal computer I owned was a used VIC-20 I bought off a uni classmate.

(Yes, yes, walking to and from school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, etc. ...)

[that one in the corner]

Re: COSMAC ELF SBC / RCA CDP1802

Did your friend have the hifi audio output peripheral* on his board?

* Aka I just wired a piezo earpiece from GND to, well, pretty much randomly**. High address bit line was good - as you say, only 256 bytes populated, but the 16-bit address bus was sent out over only 8 pins, so there was a CS line decoded to ensure the RAM only acted on the low byte: pick up an appropriate 74LS part from Maplins, some far too thick bell wire, and play silly buggers with the claimed location of a non-existent data byte... You know, when one comes to think about it, we had to actually understand our micros back then, just to be able to play a squeaky "Daisy Bell".

** Not even a genuine ELF board, a cheaper UK kit. IIRC did learn there was an "approved" way to wire the earpiece and other people had better bleep-making code, but getting hold of that info was not so easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Camera

They could start with optimising Google Camera which kills all other running apps whenever you use it

[David 132]

"App's"

FTFA: "Android has announced strict memory limits, and Play wants to ensure your app’s fall within this..."

Apparently they also need to crack down on badly-written processes that leak rogue apostrophes into their documentation.

Yes, that error is in the original material from which this article quotes. Shame on me, shame!, for thinking that it was an error by Thomas C.

[Steve Aubrey]

Re: "App's"

That's not funny, that's sic

[gryphon]

Not just RAM

Devs also need to look at the actual size of their apps as well.

Looking at you Uber, something like 400+ MB to do not a heck of a lot.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Not just RAM

Sounds like it's an electron app. You can do the same using a web view but that would require developers, or their bosses, who care. Given how Uber treats drivers and customers, do you think that's likely?

[Dan 55]

Do as I say, not as I do

There's plenty of bloat in Android that could be cut first.

[sstroud]

Re: Do as I say, not as I do

Cite, as it's far more efficient than iOS, which does a lot less, and uses alot more resources to do so.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Do as I say, not as I do

What do you base this particular assertion on? I'm not a fan of IOS but this is more down to the synthetic restrictions imposed on devices and users. On phones it's a bit difficult to make meaningful comparisons, but high-end IPads can easily compete with desktops.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Do as I say, not as I do

Having just flashed LineageOS onto an old phone, I'd beg to differ. When compared with, say, Windows, Android has a much lower footprint and, as an OS, much less crap.

[Dan 55]

Re: Do as I say, not as I do

It comes with the Play Services binary blob which is is used to gather and upload telemetry. It comes with Google apps which push Google services. The architecture doesn't allow backup/sync to non-Google servers, you get Google instead of a choice. It allows OEMs and telecos to add their changes.

Android 4 required 340MB RAM for the kernel and 350MB of storage for the system. By Android 14 it was up to 1824MB of RAM for the kernel and a strong recommendation for devices with up to 4GB RAM to be 32-bit only and storage must at least 1.1GB for devices that have up to 1GB for the kernel. Figures taken from the Android CDDs.

Custom ROMs do not have to include a lot of Google stuff and skip OEM and teleco stuff entirely but an average Android device has bloated over the years and when there was competition, Android devices had more RAM and storage than contemporaries like Symbian because the OS needed it.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Do as I say, not as I do

You're conflating the OS itself with what manufacturers provide. While this is reasonable in the sense that this is what most people experience, it isn't about the OS itself. For manufacturers Google provides an OS as a service that they can quickly adapt for their hardware: this is a standard commercial relationship. I don't know whether Google has as restrictive licence agreements as Microsoft does, but some manufacturers do seem to provide alternatives for some services. They're free to use the open source variant if they're not happy. As a consumer, I like the way that Google will at least provide some OS updates directly and has managed to get more manufacturers to provide longer term OS support.

But to complain about a consumer OS with a hi-res GUI requiring 2GB RAM in 2026 seems misplaced. What are the minimum requirements for MacOS or Windows? Yes, the AI bubble has significantly increased the price of RAM, but this after years of declining prices. But perhaps the current bottleneck will force at least some developers and manufacturers to reduce memory requirements.

The comparison with Symbian is interesting, but I wonder what a putative Symbian in 2026 would need? I seem to remember from Andrew Orlowski's very informative articles about EPOC and Symbian, that a future rewrite would need more memory, for pre-emptive multitasking and hi-res screens if nothing else. Sure, the Dalvik VM means more memory is required than purely native code, but this comes with less need to manage memory and greater flexibility in hardware.

None of this means I'm a huge fan of Google – after all, I have just installed LineageOS on one of my phones, I don't use YouTube, Google Maps or GMail – but I think the criticism should be directed more at the harvesting of personal data rather than simply talking about "bloat".

[alkasetzer]

Will google apply the same limits to google developed software?

It would be funny if they applied the same limits to chrome, gmail and youtube. But I'm guessing they will classify those as games so to be exempt :P

[Anonymous Coward]

> chrome ... classify those as games so to be exempt

That would be our own fault: "Use Chrome? To read Facebook? You 'aving a laugh, mate?"

A laugh? It's a game! kerching!

[BassX]

If only Microsolop took the same approach, especially after going back to claiming 8GB is enough for Windows.

[Irongut]

Android has announced strict memory limits

Except they haven't. Nowhere in ANY of Google's announcements lists these memory limits, which is really fucking useful as an Android developer.

How the hell am I supposed to hit (or avoid) a target I can't even see?

Thanks for fucking nothing Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Android has announced strict memory limits

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/17492799#zippy=%2Creduced-memory-usage

is that of any use to you?

[heyrick]

Dear Google

Lead by example - sort out the memory and space consumption of both Chrome and Play Store.

Chrome: application ~400MB, app data ~400MB, cache has shot up to ~360MB. So that one app is responsible for around 1.2GB of storage. *One* app.

[sstroud]

Re: Dear Google

Unused RAM is wasted RAM, particularly in a browser. All OSes, Windows, Android and probably iOS have different memory pools, some are permanent, some need to be handed back is something else needs it.

Sadly, the idiots on the internet don't really understand this.

[AmigaE]

It took this ?

Just because you have a gigabyte of memory, write code like you got 64k.