Recently upgraded to /e/os 4.2 that got me an Android 16 on Teracube 2e. However, Android 16’s memory management is too harsh/invasive for it.
Browser (Vivaldi) reloads active page after a 10-second-long screen lock (with 5-6 tabs opened, not 40+, which was OK for Android 15), music player stops even during middle of a song (no other active apps).
Online purchases don’t work for this reason: my bank’s 2FA simply makes browser tab reload and thus makes payment almost impossible.
So my questions:
is it just me or someone else is affected by it?
can I (or developers with a patch) config it that it’s not that invasive?
can I downgrade /e/os version? If so (and if it wouldn’t get me vulnerabilities), how?
I haven’t bought anything recently so I haven’t seen all the problems you described but I indeed noticed that using multiple apps concurrently has become a lot more difficult as they get killed one after the other by the system’s memory management.
@grzecel I’ll try clearing the caches to see if it helps, though I did not expect that to be related to RAM footprint (interested in a rationale, if you know one)
Well @silmathoron , I think their rationale is a tad stabbing in the dark, but I find it a common sense approach, like with PC browsers, to clean any rubish residue anywhere you can, if does not make harm try it to get a clean playing field.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately it didn’t help much. Maybe not every app switch triggers it now (after clearing cache), but it is still unreliable. I’ve just cleared it again and it was 150+MB, which seems huge.
I understand their point of view, but in this case, I regard the upgrade to Android 16 premature. Maybe A16’s minimum system requirements are too much for this hardware. Totally acceptable, but then why do it anyways? Was there enough testing? I don’t use the phone that much (less than average person, I think), so heavy usage is not the main cause.
I think they try to balance their approach but it is difficult. I can see plenty of people chasing them all the time for android version upgrade, like they have an obsession . Those I guess believe blindly in better ‘security’ with higher number versions.
In debugging Vivaldi I suggest to use the performance of default Browser as a benchmark. Maybe also check that your Vivaldi version is the latest suitable for a16. The app update would not be part of the ota-upgrade.
On your broader point there can be downsides to being a early adopter for any Upgrade of Android version.
The method to downgrade Android version would be a fresh install after backup.
Does the issue persist with a clean install from scratch?
Users very much like the convenience of an in-place upgrade to a newer Android version, as opposed to installing from scratch, which is the clean approach and the only one developers can reliably test. Nobody really knows what awaits an upgrade on a device out there in the wild.
The user expectation of convenience is the only reason such upgrades get offered via the updater, as results can be unpredictable and developers always can only cross their fingers that not too many users might experience strange effects or failures. With any OS. On any device.
It seems that new version after new version Android is getting always more aggressive at limiting Apps running, probably to save battery or to compensate for performance needs elsewhere.
Mostly this affects the background (though can be seen already), but sometimes effects work their way clearly through to the foreground and hamper user interaction.
It might not be due to limitations of the hardware, it may be software, as experienced for instance on a different phone with a different upgrade step of a different Android OS here … FP4 (Android 15): Background apps being killed more aggressively - Fairphone 4 - Fairphone Community Forum … which in the end got fixed in software.
So it might be worth to report the issue to the developers … Report an issue | /e/OS documentation
. Those I guess believe blindly in better ‘security’ with higher number versions.
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