Random Access Memory or RAM is an important metric to measure a smartphone’s performance and usually increases proportionally with the phone’s price. To keep budget phones more attractive, companies are now marketing phones with higher RAM than what they physically have, claiming a ‘virtual’ or ‘extended’ RAM can remedy the bottleneck. This feature is sold under different names—Extended RAM, Memory Extension, RAM Expansion, RAM Plus, and RAM Boost, for instance. Smartphone brands rely on it to falsely advertise higher performance on cheaper phones with 2 or 3GB RAM. Nokia C12 Pro, Realme C30s, Redmi A1, and Samsung A04e are some of the entry-level phones, which claim to have double or more the actual physical RAM.
RAM and storage Imagine you own a bakery where some fresh products are displayed on shelves to be sold immediately. As customers buy the items, you replace them with newer ones from a stock room, which also stores all the daily ingredients. Likewise, the RAM is only used to store information momentarily and is, therefore, like those open display shelves in the bakery. The storage preserves data for longer and is, thus, the stock room. Android also has a third type of memory: ‘zRAM’, a part of the physical RAM reserved for low-priority tasks.
What is virtual RAM? Unlike the zRAM, virtual RAM is not part of the physical RAM module and uses a section of the phone’s storage to store low-priority processes. It is like a small section of the stock room used to store products, like salads, that are in low demand or sell only during a specific time of the day. While you may forego this additional section, dedicating a small space for low-demand items can benefit business without hampering operations.
Why is it needed? As the number of your customers increases, you must equally prepare to serve those who come to buy bread and those that want a quick salad for lunch. Moreover, you must add more options to the menu, which needs more storage space. Android applications, in a similar fashion, have got more demanding over the years, and consumers now want to run more applications on their phones. Virtual RAM is especially beneficial on devices with low RAM, that is, limited display capacity on the shelves, and the nook is utilised for low-demand items.
Verdict Virtual RAM is not intrinsically a part of Android and is only added over the top by smartphone brands licensing it from Google. While it can be viable on high-end phones, it ends up doing more harm to your low-cost phone than benefiting it. It cannot replace—or add to—the primary RAM because it is part of the storage and has much slower transfer speeds than actual RAM.
