I’ve got a 12. I bought it when it was last year’s model so it’s a couple of years old now.
I was just wondering does anyone actually multitask on these phones? These being the older ones with only 4 gigs of ram like the base 12 and 13.
I don’t really multitask, I use one app at a time usually - but every so often when I have to switch between, even only 2 apps, half of the time the app in the background will have been lost and reloaded. I’d then have redo all the steps i had done to get to that section of the app e.g re-search and re-apply the individual filters on Ebay. It’s kinda infuriating.
Is multitasking reserved only for the pro level iPhones, or something? I know iPhones are supposed to be more ram efficient but I’ve used androids with twice the ram before and I would not say they are equivalent. It doesn’t seem to be a problem on the higher level androids, you can hold whatever in the memory.
The ram efficiencies don’t seem to make up for the actual lack of ram.
It isn’t the ram, it’s shitty app developers. I’ve had the latest Pro Max models for the last few years and it happens with some apps on these too. Others multitask fine because their devs are competent.
The problem is caused by badly written apps. iOS (and iPadOS) has a very different memory management than Windows or macOS. There is no memory swapping to the “hard disk” and therefore if an app in the foreground needs memory every app in the background could be ended by the system at any time. That’s why app developers should always implement saving everything automatically while the app is in the foreground or at least when it goes to the background. Switching to an automatically closed background app means reloading the saved state. This should be exactly the same state as the app was when it went to the background.
There are obviously bad apps that do not follow this requirement. These apps are your problem.
New iOS versions are very ram intensive. My XR with 3GB ram had no problem with iOS 15 but could barely handle iOS 16 or 17. The 11 or 12 with 4GB aren’t much better on iOS 17.
The models with 6GB ram (12 Pro, 13 Pro, all 14 models, 15 non-Pro models) are like a night & day comparison, but I’m sure these won’t be enough for future iOS versions. 15 Pro models are the first ones with 8GB ram. You’ll probably need that by the time iOS 19 rolls around.
Multitasking doesn’t really exist in iPhone not in the standard definition of it anyway. Plus it doesn’t hold internet connection for a lot of them anyway if you’re out for more than a few seconds. They really need to overhaul this
As others have said this is an optimization issue and not a device/OS issue. 4 gig of ram should be plenty for modern apps.
The problem is shitty app developers that write apps with no optimizations. If the iPhone had 12gb of RAM those apps would still use all of it, it would just take slightly longer to happen.
It’s about balance. Big companies like eBay, Snapchat, Vinted, Tinder, etc etc all want to just write one app for all platforms and that leads to tradeoffs on both platforms. On Android those devices have more RAM because they NEED more RAM as the number of badly optimized apps is a bigger % relative to iOS.
Here’s an analogy: The case you put your phone into. If you buy the same brand for both but the Android phones case feels nice in the hand but the iPhones one feels awful and gritty and sticky and doesn’t fit correctly. That’s not the iPhones fault, it’s the manufacturer of the cases fault.