The reason is the rising memory chip prices. The memes about RAM prices are funny and all, but the consequences of the memory supply crunch are anything...
I think we’re starting to see people using their phone as their primary computing device and are asking more and more from it as they abandon laptops and desktops
High resolution graphical assets are big. That’s why we’re now getting 32GB video cards in desktop PCs.
Sure, nobody’s doing super high end graphics on a phone, but it doesn’t take much high resolution art to take a big bite out of that 6GB. Phones don’t have separate system and video RAM, remember.
Android has traditionally been very stingy with memory. Like really stingy. It depended on the device but back in those days you could not assume your app could use more than 16MB of RAM. That was the default heap size limit. High-res devices often had the limit set to 24MB.
Only starting with Android 3.x apps could request more (largeHeap setting in the manifest).
By contrast, iPhones around that time had 2GB of RAM but an app could use almost all of it.
Not too long ago, 4 or 6 GB ram were plenty. What happened that modern Android „needs“ that much memory?
I think we’re starting to see people using their phone as their primary computing device and are asking more and more from it as they abandon laptops and desktops
Get real. No one is doing real work on a fucking handheld.
High resolution graphical assets are big. That’s why we’re now getting 32GB video cards in desktop PCs.
Sure, nobody’s doing super high end graphics on a phone, but it doesn’t take much high resolution art to take a big bite out of that 6GB. Phones don’t have separate system and video RAM, remember.
Android has traditionally been very stingy with memory. Like really stingy. It depended on the device but back in those days you could not assume your app could use more than 16MB of RAM. That was the default heap size limit. High-res devices often had the limit set to 24MB.
Only starting with Android 3.x apps could request more (largeHeap setting in the manifest).
By contrast, iPhones around that time had 2GB of RAM but an app could use almost all of it.
RAM got cheap and people got lazy on efficiency.