Android smartphone users will soon have more control over power-hungry apps and be able to limit the amount of RAM allocated to them. Google has announced that Android 17’s per-app memory limits feature will be available on more devices next year.
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The ability to limit the amount of RAM for a single app first appeared on Google Pixel smartphones. Soon, more vendors will be able to use it in smartphones with 4 GB of RAM or more. Essentially, Google wants to ensure that no one app can use too much memory, slowing down the entire device.
To prevent this, an Android feature is activated that kicks in if an application exceeds the limit of available memory allocated to it. In this case, Android may move some application data to compressed memory. This keeps the application running, but may slow it down. If an application continues to consume RAM beyond the limit in this situation, the operating system can force-terminate it. For the end user, this approach means that the smartphone is less likely to slow down due to applications using more RAM than is allocated.
Google wants to let third-party Android app developers properly optimize their products. After such optimization, the new features will not have any impact on the operation of the application. Meanwhile, Android itself will remain more responsive when switching between apps, playing games, or performing resource-intensive tasks.
This innovation could be particularly useful for smartphones with smaller amounts of RAM, where memory-consuming applications can have a significant impact on overall device performance. However, there is a drawback. Applications that do require a lot of memory can slow down or crash if developers don’t optimize them properly. To avoid this, Google is providing developers with new tools to help them avoid such problems in the future.
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