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?
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.
RAM boost? ReadyBoost?
So it all just swap?
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.
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.
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.
Idk the Samsung tablet. And yeah it might be device dependent, too. I guess I didn’t think of that being the case.
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.