Recently, the release of Android’s 5.0.1 version was found to contain a serious issue – the operating system’s memory manager was broken, resulting in incorrect handling of the cache, and as a result, the memory wasn’t getting cleared properly. This has been causing huge issues for many users ever since they’ve installed the update, especially those running the operating system on devices with low RAM. Thankfully, Google have been quick to address the problem, and an upcoming new update for Android fixes the memory leak.
The problem was related to Android’s ability to manage its own memory for applications that have exited or crashed – normally, the operating system knows when to load and unload data from/to RAM in order to ensure that the battery is conserved as much as possible. Due to the bug, this feature wasn’t working correctly, resulting in users running out of memory, and subsequently having various apps crashing, especially those that are heavier on their memory requirements.
Affected devices have been reported to include Google’s own Nexus 7 – the 2013 version, the Nexus 4 and 5 and more. Some users have been reporting nearly memory usage nearly three times over the norm, and extremely sluggish performance during some operations.
According to reports, Google have identified the issue and have pushed it to a future update coming to the operating system, though it’s not yet known when it will be released. Until then, users should be more careful in managing the memory on their devices, especially when running resource-intensive applications that can drain the battery quickly, or overlap with other applications in memory.
On the other hand, when the memory manager is running correctly, the operating system is surprisingly good at handling the contents of its cache properly. For example, the practice of constantly killing off applications that aren’t in active use is actually not very beneficial to battery life, as it forces a memory load/unload, which can put more strain on the battery, as opposed to leaving the app running in “idle” mode which doesn’t affect Android at all. When memory is not enough for a new application, that’s where the memory manager kicks in, removing unused applications from the cache – and when this component stops working properly, the effects can be severe.
Other than that, most users seem happy with the new 5.0.1 version of Android, as the update has brought various extra small features and bugfixes, further improving and refining the experience according to user feedback. The new version has slowly been rolling out to various devices, although it still hasn’t reached the full market segment that it was originally intended for, which is normal for Android updates.