Fairphone Updater using 20 MB

I see that on my Fairphone 2 with Fairphone Open 16.12.0 the Fairphone Updater program is using 20 MB. Is that not a bit much for a background program that just needs to check when there is a new update of the operating system? What does an update checker need to load into RAM?

So you are talking about that the Fairphone Updater is using 20MB of RAM?

  1. Why do you care about 20MB of RAM? The Fairphone 2 has 2GB of RAM way more than 20MB.
  2. Android regulates RAM usage and kills old apps if the amount of RAM needed is too high.
  3. Free RAM = Wasted RAM
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While I don’t care too much about 20mb of RAM wasted, it is not so easy as you say.

  1. it can’t just kill the updater app as it would stop working and would not be autostarted again until next reboot. So Android will try to keep the underlying service running.
  2. free RAM=wasted RAM agreed, but that does not imply that I want to waste my RAM on an updater that is useful every 2 months. I’d rather use the RAM for my 7 Firefox tabs or my instant messenger.

It would be perfectly possible to use Androids Alarm mechanism to wake up the updater once a day, have it check for updates and exit it again. This way it would not occupy system resources unless checking for updates. But then perhaps that is overkill for such a smallish tool…

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But there is not only an Updater, there are more apps which waste RAM for background checking (e-mail, Twitter, etc.). It would be fine if they use as low RAM as possible.

My apps are wasting so much RAM that Android kills apps which are actually in use. (So the navigation app is closed when I, as a passenger, not the driver, open Firefox to look something up.) Although there is actually no RAM needed because 500 MB are free. (A workaround is to look for background apps which you currently don’t need and to force-close them.)

Using more RAM than you actually need = Wasted RAM

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