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    The iPhone is 2x More Memory Efficient Than Android Smartphones

    22 Dec, 2014

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    Apple may be losing the smartphone battle, but a new report suggests that the company's signature iPhone is twice as memory efficient as Android devices. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's ever owned or used an iPhone, as running multiple apps is a breeze and it rarely triggers a drop in performance. So, how is the iPhone able to accomplish such a technological feat?

    Manufacturers continue to pack more and more RAM into Android smartphones. The Nexus 6, HTC One (M8), OnePlus One, and Samsung's phablet-sized Note 4 all feature a whopping 3GB of RAM. This is in stark contrast to the iPhone 6, which uses just 1GB of RAM. Conventional wisdom would suggest that Android devices should outperform their counterpart given they contain 200% more RAM, but this isn't the case. On the contrary, the iPhone leads the pack by delivering greater performance with less physical memory.

    Glyn Williams, a self-proclaimed "Grizzled game industry veteran," offered an explanation for this phenomenon. According to Williams, the reason why the iPhone outperforms Android devices is because Android apps use Java – and Java requires a considerable amount of RAM to function properly, which places a heavier load on the device's memory.

    Each time you open an Android app, it uses memory from the device's RAM. This memory is recycled through a process known as garbage collection. Usually, this works well without any issues, but if too many apps are running simultaneously, it may cause slowdowns or other problems.

    Williams also says that Android works best when apps have between four to eight times more memory than what's strictly needed. This ensures that garbage collection (RAM recycling) operates efficiently. If an Android device has less than this, it may result in performance slowdowns.

    "In other words, you need four or eight times more memory than you are actually using to be super efficient. But when the memory becomes constrained, that performance goes way down," wrote Williams. "This is why Android devices have all that RAM. iOS does not use this style of garbage collection and does not slow down in constrained memory environments."

    Because the Apple iPhone doesn't support Java, it doesn't need the extra memory for garbage collection. This also contributes to the iPhone's long battery life, as additional RAM consumes more power.

    Can you tell a difference in performance between the iPhone and Android?

    Related Tags

    RAM
    performance
    Apple
    Android
    iPhone
    memory efficiency
    Java
    smartphones

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