Cheap Smartphones With Less Than 2GB Of RAM Can No Longer Run Android, Starting Later This Year
Aadhya Khatri
The change will start with Android 11 in Q4 2020. What’s new is all handsets introduced with Android 10 or 11 will have to have a minimum of 2GB of RAM
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Most smartphones have a large amount of RAM now, even the mid-range or budget-friendly handsets. However, there are still some cheap phones that have a quite low amount of RAM.
According to some leaked reports, starting later this year, Google will require phones to have at least 2GB of RAM to run Android.
The change will start with Android 11 in Q4 2020. What’s new is all handsets introduced with Android 10 or 11 will have to have a minimum of 2GB of RAM.
So after this change is made official, what comes next for phone manufacturers is when they produce phones with RAM equals or is less than 2GB, they must inform and advertise these handsets as running Android Go.
This new policy is applied for all devices shipped with Android 11 and those launched after Q4 2020 with Android 10.
Devices already on the market do not need to switch to Android Go and can remain as standard Android devices.
For buyers, this change means we will see a larger number of devices with Android Go on board on the market. Those who are interested in a device running this lite version of Android might likely see they have more choices at different price points.
Google is also raising the bar for devices running Android Go. Currently, the operating system can run on a device with only 512MB. The new standard now is at least 1GB of RAM.
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