Android 13 Raises Minimum System Requirement To 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage 50
Android 13 has recently hit the streets, and with it, Google is raising the minimum requirements for Android phones. From a report: Google's latest blog post announced that the minimum amount of RAM for Android Go, the low-end version of Android, is now 2GB for Android 13, whereas previously, it was 1GB. Esper's Mishaal Rahman and Google Product Expert Jason Bayton also claim the minimum storage requirements have been bumped up to 16GB, though Google doesn't seem to have publicly documented this anywhere. The increase in system requirements means any phone that doesn't meet the minimum specs won't be able to update to Android 13. New phones launching with Android 13 will need to meet the minimum requirements to be eligible for Play Store licensing, though launching with an older version of Android (with lower requirements) will still be an option for a while. Technically, anyone can grab the Android source code and build anything with it, but if you want to license the Google apps and have access to the Google-trademarked brand "Android," you'll need to comply with Google's rules.
Talk about a walled garden (Score:3)
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Almost everyone uses the Play Store. Just because a selling point of Android is you can sideload other stores doesn't mean the Play Store isn't the most popular and convenient app store on Android.
The longer I have Android, the less I've used the play store. I've nothing against it but it's usability is minimal at best these days. Difficult to find what you're looking for unless you're following an outside link.
Beyond that almost everything works and works better via the web browser these days. My banks "apps" are a slow, buggy pile of crap these days, all of them, and their desktop web site works fine in my browser. I think organisations are giving up on apps as they're just single use web browse
Re:Play Store? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would "anyone" care about this? This is for phone manufacturers. Are you under the impression a person shopping for a phone is going to think "What? I want a phone specifically with less than 2GB of RAM, and through my research, I have found out that Goggle is not allowing phone manufacturers shipping with Android 13 to carry the Play Store on their phone if they try and sell me a 1GB RAM phone? Well now I'm going to build my own phone, or maybe I'll buy a 1GB Android 13 phone without the Play Store, or barring that, I'll buy an Android 13 phone with more than 2GB and *erase* the Play store off of it in protest! Take that, Google!"
In other words, what are you smoking?
Re:Play Store? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the whole point of Android is you were not in a walled garden. Canâ(TM)t imagine anyone using Google Apps now unless they are forced to for work.
There is such a thing as minimum specs for an OS. If manufacturers want to use Android along with advertising trademarks these are the minimum specs set by Google. Now if manufacturers want to take Android and fork it and maintain their own branch then that is an option. Just like someone can fork the Linux kernel to run on CPU architectures like Itanium that are no longer supported. It can be done; just do not expect it to be supported by the original branch.
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Why not take a precedent from Linux distributions and include a user initiated event (big button to be pressed on first boot) that imports the Play libraries and apks from the internet to the system rom via fs overlay.
Because it's not legal to distribute them. Google has historically turned a blind eye to large scale not for profit distribution of gapps, but if any handset manufacturer of note were to do this, they would definitely object.
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Canâ(TM)t imagine anyone using Google Apps now unless they are forced to for work.
This is Earth-1218 you may have entered some kind of ultimate dimension accidentally. You should go back to your universe which apparently doesn't have literally over 1.5 billion people using Google Apps on their Android devices. And yes I've subtracted the 1billion devices in China.
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Some of us have useful use of all that extra processing power
Phones are not phones. They're computers that can also let you make phone calls. A large majority of modern cellphone users use their "phones" as general purpose computers - capable of messaging, browsing the web, being a camera, providing entertaining - as much as, if not more so, than a phone. A majority strong enough to drive the requirements of market.
I feel like this is a point that has to be made over and over and over again. But I suppose i
Re:What rot. (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel like this is a point that has to be made over and over and over again.
It isn't.
But I suppose it's not /. without somebody going, "I don't get it, why do computers need to be more powerful? I thought we'd finished with writing all the software we needed to do everything and anything at arbitrary scale and fidelity instantaneously back in 2014"
Literally nothing most users do on a phone benefits from more than 4 cores and 2GB, because the hardware does video encoding and the phone doesn't have enough IO to use more except in niche cases.
I'm fine with computers becoming ever more powerful, but we're already at the point where a budget phone serves most needs, except maybe for camera quality.
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budget conscious phone can do calls, texting, map and directions, lookups on internet and even take good-enough pictures. Anything more is mainly just pandering to juveniles.
Re:What rot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, and I use mine for all that stuff, plus I play the occasional game — mostly puzzle games though, most other phone games are crap anyway, btdt. I do have a couple oldies on there like hydro thunder jic I'm that bored.
I get that people like shiny toys, me too. But phones are a place where I won't spend a lot of money because they are too easily broken. My cheapo phone is actually still looking great because I put it in a big chunky funky case this time, so it doesn't matter if it looks great. In that regard, it's exactly like an expensive phone (especially since it has glass on both sides, so it looks expensive until you recognize the moto logo.)
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Literally nothing most users do on a phone benefits from more than 4 cores and 2GB
man, I gotta say today has been a banner day for me for people using the word "literally" in a statement provided with zero information to support it
more than 4 cores and 2GB
this is a weird thing to say in a thread that started with somebody suggesting nobody should ever need 2GB in a phone because "by far most of us don't need it" in response to Google ... literally .. saying 2GB was okay if you wanted to ship with the Google
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It might seem weird if you have a fetishistic devotion to forcing people to discuss only a single topic in a single discussion or thread.
Otherwise no, it's not weird at all, especially if you read the surrounding comments. But I guess Slashdotters don't read.
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Literally nothing most users do on a phone benefits from more than 4 cores and 2GB
That's like saying "there's no need for more than 640K".
When the standard is higher, developers assume more, and lower end hardware becomes a bottleneck. Web pages have become more complex, applications have become more graphical. Even if 2GB is enough today, it will become a bottleneck tomorrow. I remember how my phone with 512MB of RAM felt when that was no longer the basic standard.
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The funniest thing about this is that it doesn't actually materially add to its functionality. It's still just a phone.
Tell that to all the tablets out there that run Android. I would suspect that those tablets might have a problem being called "just a phone".
Android isn't limited to just phones.
Inflation strikes everywhere this year (Score:1)
Money, RAM, storage...
Everybody's getting fat except Mama Cass
Bloat! (Score:2)
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16 Gigabytes of storage--for a cellphone?! Hahahahahaha!
The real LOL is that people still think it's a cellphone rather than a highly capable computer that people build their entire lives around. 2.5 billion Android devices out there. I'd wager a not insignificant chunk of them can't make phone calls, and another not insignificant chunk of them are owned by people who don't make phone calls even if they could. Shit I don't even my calls on my work phone. It's a texting / email / MS Teams device for me. My girlfriend's Android "phone" literally has more in common
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As I stated in another post. Android isn't just for phones. There are a lot of tablets in the world that are running Android.
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There is a report back in the days of the original iPhone (the one with 4 or 8 GB of storage) that RIM went to examine how Apple managed to squeeze so much functionality into it.
They were shocked when the OS consumed a whopping 512MB of storage - at this point the smartphone OS was expected to fit in about 8-32MB of flash storage. If you had gigabytes of storage, it was pure storage, not used for the OS.
Granted, when the iPhone came out, generally devices had between 16-128MB of storage.
One of the weirdest and most annoying things (Score:2)
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Yep - definitely time Google employed a better class of zoo keepers!
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I wonder... (Score:2)
How much of that requirement is based in reality, and how much of it is sheer pointless bloat? It's hard to believe that the core functionality of the OS - you know, phone calls, texts, browsing, email, tracking and spying, advertising - has grown to the point where a doubling of RAM is necessary.
I keep monitoring the PinePhone to see if any of the distros is at the point where the device is usable as a daily driver. I may just suck it up and get one anyway. I'm getting more tired of Google's various attitu
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Why don't you just get an unlockable Android phone and put LineageOS on it? It gets rid of most of the google fuckery, and even if you don't use the play store it will still give a better experience than a pine phone, which by every single account is still garbage as a phone.
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Why don't you just get an unlockable Android phone and put LineageOS on it? It gets rid of most of the google fuckery, and even if you don't use the play store it will still give a better experience than a pine phone, which by every single account is still garbage as a phone.
I've done that a few times - current phone is Samsung A520 with Lineage. But avoiding Google means it's a pain to back up texts and phone history - delimited text files are the only option I've found. And for calendar software I'm limited to something like Proton calendar, which I don't like. And frankly, every mobile browser I've tried sucks ass - I choose from among what for me are 'bad' and 'worse'. Between F-Droid and sideloading apps - including some apps I got from Play Store on previous phones - Andr
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and how much of it is sheer pointless bloat?
One man's bloat is another's critical feature.
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Android does not need 2GB to run. This isn't a "code growth thing" this is an "app ecosystem" thing. Not even necessarily their apps.
Note what's being asked: if you want to ship with the Google Play Store - an app store branded Google - ship with enough RAM to support a typical modern phone apps.
If the user is downloading apps from the store, there is a likelihood they are trying to use the phone to do something non-trivial. Play a game? Image editing? There are a whole host of relatively common user storie
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Thanks for the answer - it points out a lot of things I hadn't considered and makes perfect sense. As for the Pinephone, my primary motivation isn't the need for more RAM, or obsolescence, or anything like that. I run LineageOS, don't use the Play Store, don't have any Google apps installed, and don't do any demanding stuff on my phone. I just don't like a lot of what the Android ecosystem has to offer.
OTOH, I would get a lot more use and satisfaction out of a dockable Linux phone - and if the Pinephone eve
About Time... (Score:2)
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From my understanding, they implemented some sort of swap partition several generations ago that consumes several GB of storage.
Most Android devices now use an A/B system where there are two system partitions, and when an update is performed it's done on the inactive partition and then they are switched. This helps to prevent updates from breaking your phone. It has been available since Android 7 but almost no manufacturers used it. It is mandatory in Android 11+ phones, but a few manufacturers adopted it with Android 10. An app called "Treble Check" is an easy way to check for an A/B configuration.
2GB/16GB is a bit of a joke (Score:2)
RAM and storage on phones is sold as if it's something special which is hilarious (other than paying for it).
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RAM and storage on phones is sold as if it's something special
The RAM is special because it's integrated into the SoC. If you stack the RAM on top then it makes the SoC thicker and interferes with heat dissipation, so you really want to put it inside the package. That makes it a lot harder to have a lot of it.
The storage isn't special, but more storage does take up more space, and what's more, storage with faster I/O also takes up more space, which is why phone storage is usually small and slow. It's not a big problem on phones which have a memory card slot though, wh
Google Maps voices (Score:1)