AI's Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0185233328
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/08/27/2210241/ais-memory-crunch-is-coming-for-android-apps
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/27/ais-memory-crunch-is-coming-for-android-apps/
> The company explains that the mobile industry is now facing "significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability," which can then, in turn, affect the consumer's experience with their devices. To address this, Google is now establishing new performance thresholds across several areas, like dynamic memory usage and bitmap usage. In addition, Google is adding code optimization requirements designed to prevent things like app slowdowns and crashes related to performance.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/27/ais-memory-crunch-is-coming-for-android-apps/
[2] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/08/app-quality-memory-optimization-secure-onboarding.html
[3] http://source.android.com/docs/core/perf/memory-limiter
All these years... (Score:5, Insightful)
So Google could have provided this service, this whole time?
ALPHABET's slogan: do evil, until forced to do otherwise!
Re: (Score:2)
No one wants this. AI on your phone is one of the worst ideas I can imagine. You have a 4K screen-- and now you're trying to do pixel edits on animation?
You want to find your way through Manhattan traffic at 4pm on a Friday in your Jeep? Imagine wickedly insane requests, seemingly unlimited by token costs, barraging your phone. Remember metered minutes and texts?
These models aren't compact. 5G traffic, which is sort of tenable in most areas now, is going to MCP'ing fifty requests a minute to answer simple q
Re: (Score:2)
Um, no, the whole model isn't on the phone. I didn't suggest that. Instead, each app will grow into blimp-sized monstrosities, load phones down with MCP traffic, and drag phone performance to a crawl, all while increasing net traffic meteorically.
Prove me wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
There's nothing to prove wrong. You're talking complete irrelevant and off topic rubbish. Nothing about this story has anything to do with running AI on your phone. Not one thing. This story is about app optimisation on Android.
But even if it were, let's unpack your verbal diharrea:
- Why would an app grow to a blimp size monstrosity? Just because Google's premier LLMs are massive, doesn't mean all AI models are. There's many AI models that are small. One person even got an AI model to run on an ESP32 with 1
Re: (Score:2)
While it would have been nice, it's not exactly Google's job to force developers to be less sucky. Some may argue "evil" is placing restrictions on developers, but to do those people I say this would be a necessary evil.
What's old is new again (Score:2)
Remember having to write programs to fit into 640kb of memory or writing web pages to load quickly over dialup? There will always be resource limitations. I don't know why more developers don't start with that in mind.
Re: (Score:2)
> I don't know why more developers don't start with that in mind.
Because "get it coded fast, we'll worry about resource-related problems in a future release" is a winning strategy if you expect to never hit your resource limits.
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, I don't know why we stopped, because it's not as if modern frameworks take less time to learn or are significantly easier to visualize HTML in.
And many of the sites that migrated to these absurdly heavy web frameworks seem to be just as slow as they ever were. T-Mobile's website comes to mind. Clumsy, falls apart, and makes the fans whir in every laptop I've ever seen - and it's been like this for at least 10 years.
What are devs trying to achieve here when they use them? 'cos it sure as hell i
ObMeme (Score:2)
we're-all-trying-to-find-the-guy-that-did-this.gif
Ooh, easy! (Score:2)
Get rid of all of the fucking adtech bullshit
Re: (Score:2)
Eliminate all the hooks into AI.
Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM (Score:3)
And the ROM only had 4K of addressable memory.
Let that sink in a moment. The graphics were not great but the games worked, were playable, were responsive and used 1/500 000 000 the power of the PC I'm writing this post on. Modern programs are bloated in every possible way, graphics, computations, messaging ....
Re: (Score:2)
My favorite version of this is the original Super Mario Bros was only 40KB, with 32KB of that being code and 8KB of that being graphics. That's it. This means that most screenshots of SMB are bigger than the entire game, sometimes by orders of magnitude depending on specifics.
Well, f gloogloo! (Score:2)
I will do however I want with whatever I create. I don't need a babysitter hitting my fingers all the time. Let it be between me and my users to decide whether it's good or not. You hold your controlmania to yourself.
Re: Honestly (Score:1)
Probably. But it would mean no more java for angle of sphere, and possibly no more linkedlists for him either. You'd have to pull both from his cold dead hands. Is that something you're prepared to do?
Re: (Score:1)
He is talking about a German who claims to live in Thailand, who bloviates on topics other than the one (Java) where he might have some degree of knowledge. He is the Slashdot heir to the German toilet-throne formerly inhabited by "barefoot" (with some letter/digit substitutions) who apparently died, if his self-claims are true, of eating a lot of meat during Covid.