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?
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.