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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

> Switching back and forth between apps resets their state. That’s particularly annoying trying to decide if I should change trains at the next station and switch between the train ticket app and Google Maps.

This really drives me nuts. It seems this is due to iPhones having very little ram (even the newest 14 Pro Max has 6 GB whereas my 11 Pro Max has 4 GB). But Android phones regularly have double the ram. iPhones could get away with less ram since the CPU is very fast and the OS and apps seem to be faster too, but considering that ram is very cheap, I really wish they would just add more ram. Then again this is also true of the Macbooks which starts at 8 GB, the same as my 2018 Thinkpad.

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> I really wish they would just add more ram.

The problem the author of TFA has is that they have been adding more RAM. And apps then make use of that increased amount of RAM. So older devices with less RAM now suffer. It’s about the derivative, not the absolute amount.

Regarding the state resetting, I believe what’s more relevant is the ratio between total RAM and the maximum RAM a single app is allowed to allocate. Or maybe iOS should do more swapping? Not sure how it works.

I think swap was just launched for the first time on Apple mobile devices with iPadOS 16. Pretty sure still none of the phones swap; you’re app is either in RAM or shut down.

iOS is much more aggressive about suspending and killing backgrounded apps than Android. Apps are expected to recover from this on their own in order to provide the illusion of seamless runtime, but the difficulty of doing so scales I think superlinearly with the complexity of a given app's state, and between that and most apps these days being more like rich web browsers in that they're obligate clients for a source-of-truth backend, most devs don't seem to bother.

Honestly, I don't care how aggressive iOS is with this.

But why does Apple allow all these applications in the app store that aren't properly coded for when they get tombstoned (or whatever the term is).

Even modern applications like Yelp 'suffer' from this. And I have the latest iPhone with the most RAM.

The irony being that Android is the one whose SDK has a hell of a lot of support for this sort of suspension and recovery.

The app switching model for iOS apps has been “expect to be killed at any time” from day 1. The APIs and such are built into almost everything and everywhere it is relevant, because that is the iOS model. Terminating an app that isn’t being used is always better for battery life and system performance. Doing that well has been why iDevices have always had less ram than equivalent generation android devices.

The problem is the increasing number of giant custom “cross platform” apps, that require vastly more ram, and have never put any effort into actually being good software. Given all the BS reasons apps get rejected from the App Store the fact that not handling sudden termination isn’t something that gets apps rejected is obnoxious.

iOS has just as much support for this too. It’s built into the default constructor for all UI elements, but most devs just ignore it.

> most devs don’t seem to bother

And by devs, let’s be clear it’s product owners. As a dev this isn’t hard to do. The problem is making sure it’s made a priority.

As a product manager who cares about experience and craftsmanship, I hear you.

On Pixel devices the only apps that I've noticed this happening on are banking/finance related; I assume that's for security reasons and part of the app design.

I have a Moto G7 Play, a budget phone released in early 2019 with 3GB of RAM.

This happens pretty much any combination of apps, most of the time.

My favorite is when I am trying to authenticate to a stupid website that stupidly uses SMS-based 2FA.

I will log into the website and it will show me the 2FA input page. I then switch to my SMS app to read/copy the authentication code. When I switch back to the web browser, the state is gone. It tries to reload the same URL but of course that's invalid and the operation fails.

Yeah, webview doesn't seem to have support for saving the JS VM and DOM to disk. Maybe a custom implementation could do this, but it may also quite slow.

If I were you, I'd try a few different browser apps which don't use WebView until you find one that has proper save/restore of the open web pages to disk.

I use Fennec, a Firefox fork. It doesn't save shit lol

That's strange, to say at least.

Moto g8 for a couple of years, now g30. Just works. Can't say I have a lot of apps, though I definitely doesn't have an app for every burger joint down the street.

DDG and FF as browsers.

How old is your Pixel, though? If you try to use a phone that's old enough, you'll experience this every now and then, especially when switching between newer, RAM-hungry apps.

Go for a non-flagship, less-expensive phone with less RAM, and I expect it happens even more often.

(To be fair, my experience has been similar: on my Pixel 4 I don't have issues like this. But I've seen it happen on older phones in the past.)

I used my Pixel 2 well into the days of Pixel 5 (then I got a 4 for cheap.) I'm on a 7 now, but my comments apply to the older Pixels that I've had. I usually keep my phones for up to 3-4 years and get previous gen unless I can get a great deal.

They’re all officially EOL agree the years. Except the 7, which gets an additional 2 years of security updates.

Also, any other Android office will not get this. I have a Samsung lying around which basically was useless 2 years after

Pixel 3 was a terrible device as a high end because of only 4GB of RAM. I wanted to get it but it was deal breaker.

I had a Pixel 3 and I absolutely loved it. I only traded it in for a Pixel 7 last year because Google's trade in values were so aggressive and it was approaching a year beyond EOL. Frankly, still like the Pixel 3 far more than the Pixel 7. Pixel 3 remains my all time favorite phone. It was basically perfect except for battery life that didn't quite last all day.

I had a Pixel 3 and loved it. Not sure it's fair to say that it's a terrible device if you never owned it.

I only updated to a Pixel 5 last year because the battery was deteriorating after several years and I was given a Pixel 5 for free.

I have never experienced any app resets with the 3 or 5 (aside from banking, which is by design), and I switch between maps, browsers, camera etc. very often.

I had used an Android phone with 4GB of ram before Pixel 3 was revealed. I felt it's not enough RAM even at the time. Pixel has less bloatware so RAM usage would be a bit less, but still I didn't want to spend for brand new less RAM device. I heard complainant about background music app is killed.

You should have, it was easily the best device Google ever made. Shame about the comically short update period or I’d still be using it.

I suspect this helps drive forward upgrade cycles. The default options for Mac (which the majority of non-technical users will buy) are also pretty low and the bare minimum anyone should be working with. It's probably fine for browsing Facebook, but in a few years' time it will not be enough for more- pushing non-technical users into a cycle of upgrading their laptops every 2-3 years when it should be more like every 5-6.

I always assumed it was because the Java virtual machine required more memory to operate at the same efficiency as the ARC apps on iOS.

I was thinking about switching TO iPhone to avoid this phenomena. Apparently, I might as well just stick on Android.

What apps/phone do you experience this with? I really only see this happening with finance-related apps on Pixel devices.

That's also been my experience on Pixels.

It wouldn't even take a kilobyte to remember the current directions in google maps. The fact that it forgets them every time you switch apps is unbelievable. I thought they were using it to force people to log in, but does it happen if you're logged in too?

I have a 2018 iPhone XS and I suffer from the same problem. A few minutes (or less) and apps/browser tabs start getting killed, and most apps handle this by simply nuking all state. Multitasking is completely impossible. It’s infuriating.

I’ll give you an example of Apple and RAM.

In my country, latest Mac Mini costs ₹ 60K. Of course that comes with 8GB RAM. Add 8GB more and cost balloons to ₹ 80K. A 33% increase in price!

> iPhones could get away with less ram since the CPU is very fast and the OS and apps seem to be faster too

Too little RAM is taxing storage since the OS is swapping out/in pages from and to memory, and to a way lesser extent to the CPU. The second part of your sentence does not make much sense either, since perceived responsiveness of the user and actual OS performance are very distinct and separate metrics.

Garbage collected applications require 2x-4x more memory to run efficiently. Android apps use GC. IOS apps do not use GC. Therefore apple can ship devices with less memory to get the same effective functionality. Less memory means smaller batteries or longer battery life. It’s a good trade off that gives apple more flexibility in terms of hardware platforms.

> iOS apps do not use GC

Aren’t a lot of apps just running JavaScript (ahem, React “Native”)?

This problem was one of the things that drove me to get a new iPad Pro recently. I assume it is a RAM issue.

And the fact that Apple doesn't sell first party cases for devices as old as my last iPad Pro, and my case was falling apart. Oh, and my first gen Apple Pencil wasn't charging and the charging UX for it sucks.

4GB of RAM should be easily enough to hold dozens of apps open for instant switching. I use GNU/Linux on a phone with 3GB RAM and it doesn't need app suspension at all - well, except for the web browser (unless you use things like NoScript of course).

I think dram chips use a lot of power? Could be the lower ram helps with battery life?

My laptop has had 8 GB of RAM since 2009. My $600 HP that I got in 2022 has 32 GB.

Try to stick your laptop ram in a phone and you'll see why the direct comparison isn't fair.

RAM size is only one part of the story. The speed of the RAM greatly affects the price.

I’ll often quickly go back and forth to an app I’m crafting a reply in to make sure that iOS doesn’t evict it from memory and cause me to lose my progress while I look things up in another app. Bloody annoying.

Not so much ram as it is battery life and performance optimization

what apps have you had this issue with?

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