High-end Android phones have a lot of RAM. There are now up to 18 GB. In the meantime, 12 GB RAM seems to have become the standard for flagships. With the iPhone and iOS, however, it is significantly less.
If you look at the iPhone 13 Pro, it only has 6 GB of RAM and simpler model variants even have only 4 GB of RAM installed. But just as fast or even faster. How can that be?
The more RAM a cell phone has, the more data it can store in its memory. The more apps you open, each time the phone allocates available memory to each new process. When the RAM is full, the phone kills processes to keep things running smoothly.
But why does Android need more RAM than iOS? There is not just one reason for this, but several factors. For one thing, Android and iOS apps are built differently. Since iOS apps only run on a few models, they can be developed specifically for these chipsets using so-called native programming languages such as Swift and Objective-C.
Android apps, however, have to run on countless devices with different chipsets. For this, Android apps are written in programming languages like Kotlin and Java so that all these different devices can run the apps.
Then the apps are translated into some sort of common language and then translated a second time into native code for a specific chipset. This common language is called bytecode. However, bytecode is not intended for any specific hardware, so the device must convert the code back to native code before executing it.
And this conversion requires additional resources. This means that an app that looks and works the same on Android and iOS requires more memory on an Android device than on an iOS device.
Android also uses a memory management method called garbage collection. This process periodically attempts to purge objects from memory that are no longer in use. iOS, on the other hand, uses automatic reference counting (ARC), which automatically assigns objects in memory a numeric value based on how many other objects are referencing them, and removes objects whose value reaches zero.
Since the garbage collection only looks for unused objects at regular intervals, there can be short-term accumulations of useless information that “fill up” the main memory. ARC, on the other hand, does not have this problem – individual unneeded objects are removed from memory as soon as they are identified.
Android is also less restrictive than iOS when it comes to apps running in the background, so apps that aren’t being actively used tend to stay in RAM more easily on Android phones than on iPhones. Android’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths, but that flexibility can result in less efficient use of memory.
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