While it is unclear whether Bill Gates actually said “640K should be enough for anyone,” the question of how much RAM is enough is still pertinent. Android Go version phones typically come with one or two gigs, mid-rangers often have 4-6GB, and flagships start at 8GB and go up to 24GB.
Of course, these numbers vary by brand. Samsung and Google won’t offer more than 12GB, while Apple offers even less with the iPhone 15 Pro Max having only 8GB of RAM. However, some other brands are happy to put 16GB in a mid-range phone.
The first smartphone with 24 GB of RAM was the Red Magic 8S Pro+, a gaming phone. Since then, 5 more have been released, though most of them are not designed specifically for gaming like the Red Magic is.
But is it too much? Games are memory-hungry by nature, but these days even web browsers use a lot of RAM when visiting complex sites, especially with multiple tabs open. Another issue is that both Android and iOS may kill an app running in the background to free up RAM for the foreground app, though some brands handle this better than others.
When buying a new phone, how much RAM are you looking for?
Lately, “virtual RAM” has become very popular, promising to increase the RAM capacity, often as much as doubling it. However, it’s essentially just virtual memory with better marketing – there’s no extra RAM, the data is just written out to storage. Thankfully, with modern, fast flash storage, it works much better than with spinning hard drives.
Android’s memory model
Despite this, it feels like a clumsy solution to keeping background apps alive. For what it’s worth, Google isn’t a fan, writing, “On Android, storage is not used for swap space as it is on other Linux implementations, as frequent writes can cause wear on this memory and the lifetime of the storage medium can shorten.”
But perhaps you disagree – have you found virtual RAM to improve the usability and performance of your phone, or do you keep it disabled?