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by gf000 27 days ago
> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone.

Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.
1 comments
belowavgiq 27 days ago
Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI.

edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired with a 5090.

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impure-aqua 27 days ago
> of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy.

It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.

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gf000 27 days ago
Well, the market has consistently raised the low end of what constitutes "decent" hardware for a smartphone, and it really is not expensive today to have good enough hardware.

Why should software not adapt to reality?

As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.

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