Front left keys, front right phone. No wallet, I pretty much exclusively use Apple Pay on my watch.

I can imagine wanting to learn a newer, more modern language than python.

And yet, I’ve never run into RAM problems on iPhones, both as a user and as a developer. On iOS an app can use almost all the RAM if needed, as long as your app is running in the foreground. Android by contrast is much stingier with RAM, especially with Java/Kotlin apps. There are some hard limits on how much RAM you can actually use and it’s a small fractIon of the total amount. The actual limit is set by the manufacturer and differs per device, Android itself only guarantees a minimum of 16MB per app.

The reason is probably because Android is much more lenient with letting stuff run in the background so it needs to limit the per-app memory usage.

Those apps also use more RAM than an equivalent iOS app, simply because they run on a garbage-collected runtime. With a GC there is a trade-off between performance and memory usage. A GC always wastes memory, as memory isn’t freed immediately once no longer in use. It’s only freed when the GC runs. If you run it very often you waste little RAM at the cost of performance (all the CPU cycles used by the GC) if you run it at large intervals you waste a lot of RAM (because you let a lot of ‘garbage’ accumulate before cleaning it up). In general, to achieve similar performance to non-GC’d code you need to tune it so it uses about 4 times as much RAM. The actual overhead depends on how Google tuned the GC in ART combined with the behavior of specific apps.

Note that this only applies to apps running in ART, many system components like the web browser are written in C++ and don’t suffer from this inefficiency. But it does mean Android both uses more RAM than iOS while at the same time giving apps less RAM to actually use.

It basically comes down to different architectural choices made by Google and Apple.

It’s not hard to target the older models, with iOS it’s mostly just a few small tweaks.

It depends what you are doing. Targeting the iPhone 7’s GPU can be quite a PITA.

Upgrade your dinosaur of a phone.

Doesn’t matter either way because everyone uses WhatsApp anyway.

RCS will never be able to compete with either because it’s a GSMA standard. Apple or Meta can think of a cool new feature, add it to their client and roll it out to all their users with the next update.

If they want to add a new feature to RCS, the GSMA (An organization with over 1500 members) will have to form a committee, they can then talk about their conflicting interestes for a few years before writing down a new version of the standard, then dozens of clients and servers at hundreds of different operators need to be upgraded before everyone can use the new feature. Due to this bullshit RCS will never be able to keep up.

Not entirely true… the American Android users care about it;

Then I guess it’s nice for both of them that iOS will support RCS.

Literally no one cares about RCS.