Google is raising the minimum requirements for Android Go phones
Android Go, is an edition of Android, created for entry-level smartphones with less RAM, which translates to lighter weight and data savings, allowing OEMs to create affordable entry-level devices that empower people.
For several years, this edition of Android focused on really being functional on entry-level computers and the minimum requirements for its operation were perfect, since initially it required a minimum of 512 MB of RAM. But now things have changed and the new edition (Android 13) has at least 2GB of RAM usage.
There are not many changes with this latest update, as Google has already achieved Android 13 stability. Google says that the minimum amount of RAM for Android Go, the low-end version of Android, is now 2GB for Android 13, up from 1GB before.
However, ehe increased system requirements mean that any phone that does not meet with the minimum specifications you will not be able to upgrade to Android 13. New phones launching with Android 13 will need to meet the minimum requirements to be eligible, though launching with an older version of Android (with lower requirements) will remain an option for some time.
“The Android operating system puts the power of computing within everyone's reach. This vision applies to all users, including those using basic phones and facing real limitations on data, storage, memory, and more. It was especially important for us to get it right because when we first announced Android (Go edition) in 2017, people using low-end phones accounted for 57% of all device shipments globally,” said Niharika Arora.
The company released the first developer beta in February and made some notable announcements with the release of the second public beta in May at its developer conference. Previous Android 13 betas launched with several new features, including a notification permission tool and a photo picker to limit the images an app can access, as well as themed app icons and per-app language support. . The new Bluetooth LE audio standard is also supported. Android 13 also builds on the tablet optimizations that Google introduced in 12L.
Android Go requirements are intended mainly to enforce OEM requirements in developing countries, where it is still possible to find devices with 1 GB of RAM. Google says that today more than 250 million people use Android Go.
Android Go is not a completely different version of Android, since it's basically android with a special "low ram" tag inverted, which makes it "Go Edition". It comes with a set of special Google "Go" apps, which are aimed at low-end devices and users in developing countries.
In the blog post, Google tells developers that the update includes a release candidate of Android 13 for Pixel devices and the Android emulator and that all app-facing surfaces are final, including the SDK and NDK APIs, device behaviors, system-oriented applications and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these items and the latest fixes and optimizations, Google says the final beta version gives developers everything they need to complete their tests.
On the part of the characteristics, we can find the free cache memory optimization in onTrimMemory(), which has always been useful for an application to reduce unnecessary memory from its process. To get a better idea of an app's current minification level, it's possible to use ActivityManager.getMyMemoryState(RunningAppProcessInfo) and then try to optimize/minimize resources that aren't needed.
It is also highlighted that the kernel has some special optimizations for mapped files in read-only memory, such as downloading unused pages. In general, this is useful for loading large assets or ML models.
In addition, it also introduces proper scheduling of tasks that require similar resources (CPU, I/O, memory): concurrent scheduling can lead to multiple memory-intensive operations running in parallel, causing them to compete for resources and exceed the maximum memory usage of the application.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link