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?
When you develop an Android app it follows a defined lifecycle. The app is notified about changing states and is supposed to persist it’s data in some of them. So ideally you wouldn’t even notice that the app was killed since it would continue exactly where it was killed.
This is it, and it’s arguably a much better model. Apps are able to manage their own persistent storage, and you can always be sure that your RAM is actually RAM (and not deal with the speed and timing issues that result in you “RAM” actually being flash memory).
Problem is that it’s not at all trivial to implement, so it often isn’t implemented.
That’s true. But it’s also not trivial to implement an app that may have its “RAM” located on disk. It’s a complex problem with multiple solutions, and giving apps the freedom to do what they want with it is the way Android structured things.
And here the Voyager lemmy community insists it’s an OS issue.
That’s because voyager is a web app. It is a well designed and integrated PWA which makes it look and feel close to a native mobile app. The above mentioned preferred solution is Android specific and many multiplatform apps skip such optimization.
Nice! Thank you! That puts a lot of things in their proper context!!