I lost a draft post in Voyager on Android while I was a few apps away doing research and looking for a photo to add to the post.

That brought to me an understanding that Android will just kill apps for memory purposes.

Then I thought back to Windows 98 and how it had a page file that would write RAM information to the hard disk and use it as RAM. It was slow af, but it worked.

So I’m wondering: it’s 2026; why is Android just killing apps instead of writing them to a much faster drive for recall when needed?

  • JelleWho@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 day ago

    Indeed, RAM is a memory latch by use of a capacitor. And on an interval it replenishes the charge of this capacitor . Thus when there is no power it will lose all its data.

    These days it is possible (and Android has/does this) to just write old programs from RAM memory to the SSD, this is a slow process back and forth. But it saves RAM space and power.