[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] chinarabbit:
Another thing about Android apps, is they are made for mobile phones, meaning they are made to be turned off, kicked out of memory, and start back up as fast as possible, with being auto-kicked out of memory or not having no impact on your phone or the app itself

Even my largest game boots up in a matter of seconds, after being auto-kicked out of memory

maybe when android first came out that was a different story, but older phones usually didnt even have enough RAM to keep many programs in them anyway

but phones today are pretty powerful & fast, CPUs are speedy Dual & Quad core, GPUs are fast & powerful, and RAM has increased, albeit very slowly.. and so has RAM speed

even if you kick your biggest programs out of RAM, the programs you think you need right away, they start right back up anyway, only difference is you might get a splash screen for a few seconds.

Maybe Android users have been trained to dread starting up a program from the single-core days, but those days are pretty much gone..

I dont see much performance difference between a program starting from out of RAM and a program starting in RAM

thus, RAM should be used for programs that contain actual data you are currently working on, and need to switch between

Android is lacking a basic "Switch Program" or "Minimize Program" function, and everything is just lumped in together with closed programs and programs you dont need in a "Recently Used" programs list which just sits and cycles random programs through RAM according to the time they were closed.

thats about as unspecific as you can even get.. at least they could give us the option to select how Programs are cycled through RAM, such as by Frequency of use, Duration of use, etc.. or let us assign programs an "Android RAM Rating Preference" of 1 to 5 stars, with the higher stars remaining in memory as Higher Priority Processes

and thats something Android could throw together if they really actually cared about the quality of their OS, rather than in its ways it can be used to promote & advertise.

You often hear that "Programs dont do anything in Android RAM but take up space", and thats literally exactly my whole point. So, cool you know, i'm totally stoked that I have 500 mb more RAM so I can store even more "Programs that dont do anything but take up space" in there, and actually have the same exact amount of free RAM you get on an older phone.

RAM is needed to run processes smoothly.. in fact... and that includes the OS, your Launcher & Home Screen, all your Widgets, Games, Reference Material, Office Programs, and whatever else.

it actually takes time, energy, & resources for Android to remove processes from memory in order to make room for new processes. Only difference is if you let Android control it, it happens while you're doing other important things that could cause performance issues

and your newly opened application may initially require 20 MB ram, which android will have to adjust for, then go up to 50 which android will have to slow down & adjust for, then go up to a hundred, which android will have to adjust for,.. and if it goes back down to 50, android will slow to allow more spammy crap back into RAM, and so on and so on

its actually reading & writing to RAM a whole lot more than if you just kicked the process out altogether

the only drawback I can see to that is companies not being able to keep their programs in RAM for covert sending of data without being noticeable by the user, cause it was just so fast cause it was sitting in RAM ready to go.

-