this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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37
Why doesn't Android save app memory into storage instead of killing the process in RAM? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I lost a draft post in Voyager on Android while I was a few apps away doing research and looking for a photo to add to the post.

That brought to me an understanding that Android will just kill apps for memory purposes.

Then I thought back to Windows 98 and how it had a page file that would write RAM information to the hard disk and use it as RAM. It was slow af, but it worked.

So I'm wondering: it's 2026; why is Android just killing apps instead of writing them to a much faster drive for recall when needed?

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[–] IpsumLauren@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Some Androids do it. Motorola calls it "RAM Boost". It is basically a swap.

[–] affenlehrer@feddit.org 32 points 1 day ago (2 children)

When you develop an Android app it follows a defined lifecycle. The app is notified about changing states and is supposed to persist it's data in some of them. So ideally you wouldn't even notice that the app was killed since it would continue exactly where it was killed.

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is it, and it's arguably a much better model. Apps are able to manage their own persistent storage, and you can always be sure that your RAM is actually RAM (and not deal with the speed and timing issues that result in you "RAM" actually being flash memory).

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Problem is that it's not at all trivial to implement, so it often isn't implemented.

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

That's true. But it's also not trivial to implement an app that may have its "RAM" located on disk. It's a complex problem with multiple solutions, and giving apps the freedom to do what they want with it is the way Android structured things.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And here the Voyager lemmy community insists it's an OS issue.

[–] bazsy@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's because voyager is a web app. It is a well designed and integrated PWA which makes it look and feel close to a native mobile app. The above mentioned preferred solution is Android specific and many multiplatform apps skip such optimization.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

Nice! Thank you! That puts a lot of things in their proper context!!

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's the app's responsibility, not the system's.

On a mobile, apps must be aware that they can get killed at any time.

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Contact the developer of Voyager and request a feature to automatically save drafts. This is handled at the app level in Android, and it's 100% possible for the app to handle this transparently.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's supposed to save drafts; it just didn't in my case, and in other people's cases as well.

The Voyager lemmy hasn't been too interested in my feedback.

[–] solxix@pawb.social 1 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Then I suggest using Interstellar if draft saving is important to you. I've never had an automatic draft fail to save on Interstellar.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago

Cool, thanks for the recommend.

I think I'll stick to Voyager for now and compose my longer drafts offline.

[–] boomzilla@programming.dev 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Jerboa did neither fail me on purging drafts no matter how often I paused and resumed it. But it's a native Android app.

[–] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

That's a lot of read/write cycles to your storage for no real reason. Some phones do this now, though, bc android sucks with being resource heavy. They call it "16GB RAM with RAM boost" and it's usually 8GB + 8GB meaning that 2nd 8GB is like the ReadyBoost cache in Windows old days. It is using your local storage for extra RAM storage, but, again, that's a little ridiculous, personally.

My voyager will let me know my comment was recovered if I'm gone too long, so maybe that's a setting you can tweak.

[–] DeLancre@piefed.social 9 points 1 day ago

2nd 8GB is like the ReadyBoost cache

RAM boost? ReadyBoost?

So it all just swap?

image

[–] Magister@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yup, it's common on chinese phone/tablet where they advertised things with 16GB of ram while it's 8+8. First thing I disabled on my first phone that supported this fake RAM. This would be slow and kill your flash.

[–] Lojcs@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You wouldn't gain anything speed or durability wise from disabling swap. Normal ram is always the priority if it is available, so any time the phone retrieves data from the swap it avoids having to relaunch an app killed due to memory pressure, which would take longer. As Android is already pretty aggressive about killing apps to save battery, in the majority of cases the swap would be used to ease the blow of a sudden, memory intensive task like high resolution video editing.

Let's assume the phone storage can take 256 read write cycles (which is a low estimate). Considering that phones have at least 256 gigs of storage nowadays that gives an allowance of 18 gigs written per day for a phone with 10 year lifespan. Considering that I very rarely change the contents of the storage and the memory will likely not spill over by that amount, or at all most days, it's safe to say flash health isn't a concern.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The one time I did lose my draft, I couldn't get it back. There's no setting for memory on Android on Voyager.

So you're saying there is a swap file (I'm on a cheapier Samsung Tablet A right now), but even that's too small to hold much memory. I know in Windows you could set the size of the swap file; honestly, I'd much rather wait an extra second to get the program back into RAM than lose a draft, so I think there really must be a good technical reason it's not happening.

[–] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Idk the Samsung tablet. And yeah it might be device dependent, too. I guess I didn't think of that being the case.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I'm guessing it's more a matter of having a cheaper product with less RAM than it is about the manufacturer. I'm guessing the behavior is standard across all Android devices.

[–] JelleWho@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I believe in the developer setting you can set up howmuch you wish to store in memory and such. But this has an impact on your battery life.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why does it necessarily have an impact on battery life? Can it just be dumped into memory and frozen there as a snap shot? It doesn't need to be running.

[–] sniggleboots@europe.pub 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not a computer scientist, but doesn't keeping RAM engaged cost energy? You can't turn off your computer and expect the RAM to be unaffected like a hard drive is

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I think it costs electricity to flip bits, but unless things are moving, there's not much going on. If the app isn't actively being used, I was wondewring why it couldn't just get frozen in carbonite and dumped into storage until the user needed it again.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I see under memory only that I can turn of Memory Profiler, which I guess will tell me what's going on under the hood. Also looks like I have a whole 4G of memory, more than anyone would ever need! lol

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Because Linux and Windows take a different approach to memory management.

And Android is based on Linux.

https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-oom-killer/

[–] ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.com 4 points 1 day ago

That function would seem like a last resort no-mem/no-swap situation would it not? Standard Linux server/desktop systems have a swap partition typically by default.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Thanks for that. Pretty cool how that works. Linux does have swap files, though.