Tested: Google's Pixel 9 Pro models only have 13GB RAM for apps
Tested: Google's Pixel 9 Pro models only have 13GB RAM for apps
Google's new Pixel 9 Pro models reserve part of their 16GB RAM exclusively for AI features. I figured out how much.
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The huge amount of RAM on Android in general is less about supporting a single hungry app and more about keeping as many apps as possible in memory so that you can multitask between them without any of them losing their state. If one app manages to eat most of the memory, then it's already too little for the intended experience.
Also the memory is supposed to be enough for at least the 7 years this phone will be supported for - that's plenty of time for apps memory footprint to grow.
Maybe I'm biased by always having used devices with RAM size in the lower end (which is always also coupled by a not-so-great CPU so when you do run out of memory and the system starts killing apps you want to multitask between, you're going to notice it that much more), but I'll always take more RAM in a device that might survive a decade with a couple of battery swaps.
If apps and the OS weren’t such ram/storage hogs, this would be plenty. Like does the Home Depot app really need half a gig or more? 🙄
id imagine some apps are just running on electron or some microbrowser, so theyre fuctionally browsers and come with some of the memory penalties from running with said sdks. not many conpanies want to design something from the bottom up.
It’s shitty coding and the app stores should reject this garbage and tell the dev to ship it as a web app. If you’re going to ship an entire web browser with every app, then what’s the point of it being an app?
See also apps that bundle twenty different frameworks and then use maybe one or two percent of what’s bundled. 🙄
I presume if you run a custom ROM it would not reserve the RAM in this way
Not sure, it could be allocated in the firmware, kind of like integrated GPUs on desktop/laptop processors. For example my Amd 6800HS laptop with 16GB RAM has only 14 available because the GPU takes up 2GB (but I can change it in BIOS)
Damn. I wonder if a custom OS remove this “feature”…
I was going to say NBD, 3GB is a decent bit for the OS, but 13 should be fine for anything you want on your phone.
But most of it is for shitty LLM nonsense? Fuck that.
And? I have six total and I've never seen it go above 4 used
What are people doing on their phones that could use so much ram?
Better question. What value does Google occupying 3GB of ram on my phone offer me? What other resources is it hogging on the phone that could cause potential bottlenecks? How much will these 3gb of bloat drain my battery? Are my user land ram safe from future Gemini updates, or is google going to take even more of my RAM?