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!
I feel like this might be the wrong community for this
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
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.
No OS can do magic and turn 4GB RAM into a suitable amount for memory hungry modern web browsers.
I mean to be fair I hate Android too, I just also hate iOS :)
OP uses 4GB RAM but blames the OS.
And he’s right with that.
Android blew up with Kitkat (4.2) but even then, in 2020 was 6 GB much.
One of the problems is the only official IDE (Android Studio) stuffing every imagibable compatibility library in the apps, because dependency resolution is too hard for them (which is also because of how the OS is structured).
Btw, when i did Android app dev in 2021, i was astounded, that there’s MaterialUI and whatnot, but you still had to implement every little detail (button size, dark mode, etc) manually.
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
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.
Android probably would’ve been a slightly better experience as it is designed to work in low ram scenarios. However it still would’ve been slow as hell.
Running what is effectively desktop Firefox on a system not necessarily designed for mobile is not going to play well with low ram at all