How do iPhones with 4GB RAM perform better than Androids with 8GB of RAM?
The iPhone v/s Android fight is going on for almost a decade now, and every time one of them outperforms the other by a very slight margin in terms of features. But when it comes to performance and RAM management, iOS has always been better than Android. Even in times like this when Android phones are having 12GB and even 18Gb of RAM in some cases, Apple still ships its latest flagship model iPhone 13 Pro Max with only 6GB of RAM and still manages to perform equally if not better than Android flagships with 12GB of RAM. Now you might be wondering how exactly Apple does that and why can't Android do the same? Well, let's dig deep into this and find out the exact 'WHYs' and 'HOWs'.
What exactly is RAM.
Before we go any further in the details, let's first understand what is RAM and how does it work in Mobile phones. In very simple terms, RAM is a very fast type of storage that your Phone has (faster than your Phone's main internal storage). Let's take an example to understand this better. Let's say you pulled a book out of your bookshelf and started reading it, when you finish reading some pages and have something else to do, what would you prefer, keep the book back on the bookshelf and go through the hassle of finding it again in the pool of books when you want to read it again, or to keep the book on your table so that you can access it anytime you want without going through the hassle of finding it?
If I were at your place I would have kept the book on the table, you would do the same right? Now, Think of the bookshelf as your Phone's main storage, the book as the app that you're working on, and the table as your RAM. Gives a better picture of how things work? RAM is used in devices to load apps quicker and make your Phone feel fast. If there's no RAM in a phone then every time you want to run an application, your phone has to load that app on the main storage, and that would make the process very slow. So, when we open an app the phone pulls that app out of the main internal storage and puts on the RAM so that it can load faster when you try to open the app again. Then doesn't it simply mean that more RAM = better performance? Well, it's not that simple. Let's understand the difference between how Androids handle RAM and how is it different from the way Apple's iOS does it.
Why do Androids need more RAM?
Androids work on the principle of Virtual Machines or VMs. What does that mean? Basically, Androids implement a layering system. What's that now? Android has to run a compatibility layer all time to maintain consistency and support all the different hardware that Android runs on. Unlike Apple which designs its products in a closed ecosystem, Android has to support a lot of different hardware. Your Android phone might have a Qualcomm processor or a MediaTek one. And to maintain support over all those different platforms, Android utilizes JVM (Java Virtual Machine). All Android apps are created and compiled on JAVA, and JAVA works as the layer in Androids to run the applications. This makes it necessary to run the JAVA compatibility layer all the time in Android phones which sets JVM as the priority and that alone eats a lot of RAM.
One more factor that plays a very important role in RAM management in Androids is the Notification system. Apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, etc, need to run their notification service in the background all the time in order to give real-time notifications. Whereas Apple uses its server to manage the real-time notifications and does not depends on whether the app is running on the phone or not. Let's understand this with some images.
The Images given above have probably made it clear why Androids need more RAM than apple does.
Where android has to keep all the apps in the background (loaded in RAM) in order to get real-time notifications, Apple just needs one service running on the RAM all the time i.e. the Apple cloud server to get all the real-time notifications.
Conclusion.
The main reason why Apple devices can run equally smooth while having half of the RAM that Android has is that the Apps & Services threads are separated by real-time priority, unlike Android where every App and Service has to run on the main thread. Plus Apple releases their new phones only once a year so they spend a lot of time working on Hardware & Software harmony and optimizing their software as much as possible.Though Android manufacturers are pushing a lot of hardware improvements like better Chipsets and storage technology like UFS 3.1, still there's a long way to go before they can achieve Apple-like harmony and optimization.
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