Why Does Android Phones Have More RAM than iPhone?

The latest Android flagships smartphones usually have at least 4GB of RAM and for some there’s even more RAM that goes up to 8GB.

On the other hand the latest iPhone 7 does only have 2GB of RAM and the iPhone 7 Plus boasts 3GB.

It implies that Android smartphones consume more RAM than iOS and many people believe it to be true, but is it?

What is RAM?

First of all lets the difference between RAM and ROM. While ROM might not be the correct term to use for today’s smartphones. But most of the smartphone makers especially those from China use it instead of Internal Storage.

RAM or the “Random Access Memory” is the place where the operating system, applications and current data is present. So the device’s processor can quickly reach them.

While Internal Storage is the place where all these apps and data actually are, even when you’re not using them.

You can think of RAM as a person’s short-term memory and Internal Storage to long-term memory.

How Much Free RAM your phone has?

So if your phone has 4GB of RAM and currently it is using 2GB for OS and apps, does it has 2GB free?

There is no free RAM, as the OS might have allocated unused portion of RAM to caching or any other task. However, when you’ll open another app, the OS will re-purpose the RAM and instead of caching it will use for the new app.

It means that your phone doesn’t have free RAM, instead it has “Available RAM”, which other applications can use.

Does Android Consume more RAM?

The simple answer is no, Android and iOS both use almost same amount of RAM to load the OS and apps. However, there is a difference in how they treat the background apps.

iOS has a better solution for dealing with background apps. Whenever you put an app in the background and start using another one, the system reduces the amount of RAM used by the idle app.

Let’s say that you were Twitter and then moved to Facebook, iOS won’t kill the app until it has some available RAM. Instead it will reduce the amount of RAM allocated to Twitter.

But if you do the same in Android, it won’t reduce RAM size for Twitter and both apps will continue using the same amount of RAM.

The Reason for putting more RAM in Android Phones:

To counter this problem smartphone makers have found a simple solution. They add more RAM in the smartphone, so even you have opened dozens of apps, there will be enough Available RAM to load them all.

It is basically a difference in design and how the operating system is supposed to deal with inactive apps, otherwise Android and iOS use the same amount of RAM.