And I don't mean just Google's Android. Every single iteration. With their stupid memory management for PoWeR sAvInG.

I was typing up a rant on how incredibly boring and stupid Disclosure Day was when I just quickly switched to Firefox to look up a character's name when Android decided that I was done using my Lemmy client and just outright killed it without even giving it enough time to save my comment to drafts, like it usually does.

You can never be sure when you leave an app whether it will continue doing what it's supposed to or if it will be frozen or killed.

I've got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel. My frickin N900 with 128 MB had better multitasking than a modern Android smartphone!

You think that's bad, I got 12GB of memory and am only ever using 8GB of it, and it still pulls the same shit. Wild.

I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue. Perhaps that might help create a less frustrating experience for you.

If your lemmy client is Voyager, its not an Android only issue. Happens on iOS as well.

Yes it's a very stupid memory management meant to improve battery life by killing any app thats been running at all...

Very frustrating and idiot.

Try play any game nowadays.... The instant you switch away bam, killed.

It's baked into android. AOSP I mean, any and all android flavours.

Disabling optimization for battery doesn't help with any bigger app.

I don't love Android either and would be much happier back on iOS but with everything happening in tech I'll use Graphene until the seas look a bit smoother

Mishandling an OOM killer event is generally speaking developer error.

Nah. Thats just because the world decided your opinion was shit and didnt need to be shared. Yet here you are sharing it anyway.

I feel like this might be the wrong community for this

Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android

Funny, I switched to Android because iOS was doing shit like this.

Ugh, don't get me started on iOS. Wanted to copy some files onto my daughter's iPad and discovered that it stops the copy operation when you click on the folder that's being copied. Maybe even when you click anywhere, didn't dare test that.

I just wish Nokia had open sourced Maemo. That had everything you need fully working.

To me it looks like sometimes Android is sending KILL instead of TERM. because sometimes it works like it should and sometimes it doesn't. Not just with the one app.

Yeah, that one is even worse.

nokia did open source maemo and it's still being developed by the community. look up on maemo leste. unfortunately they only support very few phones, including the nokia n900, motorola droid 4 xt894 and the original pinephone.

really hoping i can daily drive that os at some point on some modern powerful hardware

If it's an open source app, you could test what's happening in onSaveInstanceState and onCreate with savedInstanceState/onRestoreInstanceState, maybe by attaching some tracing to it.

I thought Maemo Leste was a reimplementation effort and not a continuation.

I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)

I've got 4 GB of RAM

Sadly that's an almost unusable amount these days. The OS will use half of that just sitting idle, and Google Play Services will use a fifth of the remainder (you can enable Developer Mode and view running services to see this yourself). 4 gigs is solidly in the "only one or two apps open at a time" range.

(It doesn't help that every Android app includes its own separate copies of all its libraries and dependencies for compatibility reasons. There's no such thing as a lightweight app without going out of your way to avoid the normal development ecosystem)

Android also doesn't use swap (storing unused/rarely accessed memory contents on the disk for later), instead shifting stale memory pages to a compressed block in RAM (zram), so once it starts filling up with cached background apps it has to start killing apps or the system will hang. The less RAM you have, the sooner this will happen, and both Lemmy clients and web browsers use a ton of RAM.

A bunch of the "fediverse" reacts poorly to this. But, speaking as someone who never even considered Apple, using Android doesn't have to mean it's smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.

Honestly, the state of mobile OSs is quite sad. Everything is locked down, it's a duopoly of shit and shittier, and the Linux alternative just isn't daily driver worthy for the vast majority of users. And that's not because the development isn't going well - it's because phones have so much more proprietary shit that needs drivers, and that's if you can even unlock the bootloader in the first place, otherwise you're SOL.

I'm increasingly trying to use my (GNU/Linux) laptop where I can, and just tether the phone to it when I need mobile data connectivity.

It's not a complete drop-in solution. You can't just use a laptop with one hand while waiting in a line (well, there used to be palmtops, but those seem to be a mostly-dead class of PCs today). It consumes more power. Desktop OS software doesn't really natively have a concept of "being on WiFi versus being on mobile data", which is nice to have in phone software.

But where you can sit down and use one...man, it eliminates a ton of my irritations with phones. The locked-down stuff in most phone OSes. Those fiddly, limited onscreen keyboards. The tradeoffs that the systems make to try to minimize power use and simplify memory management from an end user standpoint (because a lot of users don't get the concept of closing programs) like the one you mention go away. Hardware is more capable and expandable, and the manufacturers have way more physical space to work with, so you don't have manufacturers throwing out things like physical headphones jacks to try to get a bit more space. The limited cooling on phones goes away. Better in terms of repairability --- I just replaced a laptop battery. If my phone's battery died, I'd throw out the phone. Using multiple programs at once, as you were doing, is much better; phone OSes just aren't really optimal for that.

I'm honestly impressed with what smartphone vendors have done within the constraints of what they have to work with, especially in how much better touchscreens have gotten over the decades --- they used to be far, far worse. But they still just face a ton of limitations imposed by the form factor.

Your phone. Not my phone, so it doesn't seem like an android problem.

Or possibly the apps you are using? I don't think I have ever had this problem.

But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.

I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel.

In which world is 4GB enough to multitask a web browser under any OS?

But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.

4GB RAM, a modern web browser, and no swap file/partition. That doesn't work well anywhere. Not Android, not GNU/Linux, not Windows, not macOS.

Using a card on a web site. Verified by Visa web page: "we have emailed you the code". So I go to the email app and get the code. Switch back to the web page. Web page: "what? Who the fuck are you?"

Android also doesn’t use swap

Years ago a friend of mine actually enabled swap on a MicroSD. It worked, no idea for how long, though. That type of memory isn't reliable enough to handle this.

I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue.

Power management does nothing when RAM is as constrained as 4GB

I've also switched from the web browser to my password manager with the password manager integration and as soon as I've chosen the password it goes back to the browser and it reloads the page without filling in the frickin password.

I've got 8GB and I've never had this problem 🤷‍♂️

Even setting aside the wear and tear issues with flash storage, swap and zram sadly don't play nice together. Zram will fill up with stale memory while swap gets the fresh stuff, which is the exact opposite of what you want and causes awful performance problems.

Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android

OP uses 4GB RAM but blames the OS.

using Android doesn’t have to mean it’s smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.

No OS can do magic and turn 4GB RAM into a suitable amount for memory hungry modern web browsers.

Found the Chromium dev!

But seriously, I've got an old laptop still in use and that's getting along fine on 4 GB. Firefox, KDE, Libre Office, background tasks, some light gaming, no problem.

Usually good programs only take lots of memory when it's available.

But seriously, I’ve got an old laptop still in use and that’s getting along fine on 4 GB. Firefox, KDE, Libre Office, background tasks, some light gaming, no problem.

Let me guess: That old laptop has a swap file or partition?

If you dislike Android so much, get https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-october-2026 Should pair well with your new >1000 Euro Steam Machine.

Bullshit

You're right. I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn't get anything done.

This wouldn't have occurred to you if you used Summit for Lemmy.

But doctor, I am Pagliacci using Summit.

90 % of the time it works every time.

I remember even my Win98 machine had to have 16GB of RAM or couldn’t get anything done.

Try to get a modern web browser working on your Win98 machine. The problem is modern web browsers eating RAM, not Android.

Android does need a lot of ram these days especially if you are running stock

I personally wouldn't use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking. Chances are they are have a ton of background stuff running and are using apps that use lots of memory

Sorry to hear that

If ever there was an excuse to switch to a E/os or another legacy android custom ROM like Lineage OS.

Because with only 4GB of RAM you're not going to get the performance you want because the operating system for newer phones takes up so much of that RAM usage.

What you're doing right now seems like you're attempting to push your hardware beyond it's limitations to run software that your phone isn't specced for.

Google generally gets around this by providing a lighter weight version of their OS for bottom tier specced phones with Android GO, and budget phones were a lot of the reason they tried this.

It's either that or, you have settings configured in such a way that when you close certain apps they aren't persistent in memory (which makes sense with a budget phone or a low specced phone) and honestly that could also be Google's fault because of default settings and their propensity for memory leaks.

I would argue that it's not every iteration of android, but I get your point. I don't think you were looking for solutions, but just in case, my comment is here.

Adding, I disabled all background access to all of the programs I don't regularly use / expect to return to.

Only like 5 apps have any background access and they never get auto-cleared.

Between that and GOS letting me block network access to apps that really shouldn't need it, my battery lasts for days.

I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking.

A couple of months ago I revived an old x86 tablet using postmarketOS. No Android anywhere. The only somewhat usable browser I could find was Falkon. Firefox was absolutely unusable. Ungoogled Chromium was a bit better but overall still shitty. Opening a second tab under Falkon was too much as well. The problematic component was 100% the web browser and there Firefox specifically. OP writes that he opened Firefox and I can confirm from my own experience of using Firefox on a RAM constrained non-Android device that FF is terrible in such scenarios. FF is great otherwise but not when RAM is low.

I would definitely buy a Jolla Phone or it would work in the US.

I would definitely buy a Jolla Phone or it would work in the US.

It should work there. The problem for you would be no direct shipping to the US.

Title correction: "I hate default settings!"

4GB ram is enough for a glorified Lemmy/PornHub device. I use a Redmi 4x with 4GB and a snapdragon 435. It's fast enough for modern mobile games (well barely). The only problem is the modern internet with too-much scripts to actually be performant on low-end devices.

Android is mostly problematic if it's a stock operating system, filled with corporate spyware, which makes the device run terribly.

My Redmi was practically useless before installing Lineage OS. Now it's good enough for most things I do.

I might buy it when they actually promised verified boot of some kind.

Also: are they still offering subscriptions instead of selling the os like they're supposed to?

I really want to like this platform, but the security functions (especially for evil maid) are really important with smartphones.

Also: isn't bubblewrap more modern than firejail? Why haven't they switched yet?

It annoys me that Voyager is smart enough to save my comment text, but not smart enough to save the post URL so it can open back up to the same place.

I've got 16GB of RAM in mine and it'll still kill my podcast/music/audiobook app that's actively playing content ... I've never had it kill my mBin app though (Interstellar), so, I guess that's nice.