Android

For the same reason turning off a screen in Android works in less than a second and doesn't drain your battery in half an hour while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.

Android is made to cache and freeze processes when switching apps. The more RAM you have, the more apps can have ready to go in an instant. When an app gets swapped out to storage, it's very clearly noticeable, and many apps don't bother to store state either. The Android approach to slick multitasking is to open as many applications as can fit in RAM, which is why apps launch faster than many Linux applications, even on much faster SSDs.

RAM really isn't that expensive, and the power savings of rarely ever initialising applications is worth it.

AI bullshit.

Tbf the high ram usage wouldnt be a problem if it cached processes in it and used it to save battery but its just pure bloat. I think phones should have a coprocessor that handles notifications like what smartwatches do and that basically free battery. But android is also bloated because apps take a very long time to launch because of the jvm and java (thats what i heard at least, idk if this is actually why its slow) so everything is just left active. Also i think android strayed too far from linux, its basically just a worse version with a mobile ui and the support of a country sized company.

They have 16GB of RAM physically, 3GB is reserved for AI. So yeah, only 13GB is usable by regular apps, even if you don't care about any of the AI stuff.

I assume 13GB shared with all active apps and not 13 per app.

Chrome casually using 8gbs with a few tabs open. Also windows 11. I got a school laptop and windows uses 5gb out of the box💀. Linux supremacy.

The problem is Android is fuckterrible at using RAM properly.

Reasons such as?

Phones don't need 16 GB of RAM.

It does have 16GB of RAM, though, it just reserves 3GB of it for AI stuff. I don't know what kind of AI stuff needs to be loaded in the background continuously, but running the same apps on other phones will also drain 3GB out of the embedded 16GB of RAM.

I can't really think of a reason why someone would buy the most expensive "AI phone" and then never use AI. The other Pixel models don't have this stuff, so people who won't use AI should probably just get a cheaper phone.

They only have a few MB reserved for Google's AI, most of the 12GB is free for all apps on other models.

On the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 9, we note just 0.26GB (275,336KiB) of locked RAM [...], a very small amount most likely used for some background tasks in the OS. However, on the Pixel 9 Pro XL, this leaps to 2.91GB (3,051,936KiB) of Unevictable and Mlocked RAM. Subtract out the Unevictable RAM from the Pixel 9, and there’s an extra 2.64GB (2,776,603KiB) reserved on the Pro models.