Do RAM boosters help Android devices?

[Fegelein]

This article here says they harm them: The article

Basically what it says is "You don't need ram boosters cause Android is super duper efficient at handling RAM" and he talks about how it will "kill" your android phone because it will... get this... "increase reads from the SD card"

Personally, whenever my 2GB RAM fills up to more than 80% I get lags stutters everywhere, mostly in games. But after a simple ram boost the problem is greatly alievated (still get lags and stutters of course, it's Android afterall)

 

[poofyhairguy]

Task killers have been bad since ICS hit.

 

[mmntech]

The article makes perfect sense to me. Basically, RAM boosters are just taking unused apps out of memory and storing it to a cache file on the SD card. Virtual Memory has been used for decades to make up for RAM limitations on computers. However, it is a lot slower. When you close out frequently used apps, they have to just load back up again, reducing battery life a bit. Using virtual memory will also prematurely wear out flash storage. Though probably not as quickly as he makes it out to be.

It's sort of well known that Android doesn't manage memory on its own as well as iOS does. Part of that because Apple has a tighter control over its ecosystem. There's probably a lot of inefficient RAM hogs on the Play Store that cause problems.

RAM boosters aren't entirely snake oil, but modern operating systems already do same job themselves, so they're unnecessary.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It's sort of well known that Android doesn't manage memory on its own as well as iOS does.

Because Android has real multitasking. Drives me nuts in iOS that apps suspend in the background unless they are special. I am so used to Android and I hate not being able to download in the background for example.

The solution to the "problem" is the same its been for 30 years- need more ram!