Hi everyone! I’m Justin and work in the Product Marketing team at Nothing, looking after hardware product marketing across smartphone and audio.

When I’m not working to bring incredible Nothing and CMF by Nothing products to life, I spend my time reading your thoughts and comments. It’s struck me lately that these two things are often interconnected. Every day I see the care, thought and planning that goes into our products and find myself learning something new. At the same time our amazing community has questions and a thirst for new information. So why not join the dots and share a bit of what I learn?

First up on this adventure is RAM Booster. I see a lot of misinformation online about this feature so thought I’d write a short, clear, description of what we actually doing so you can understand it better.

Understanding RAM

RAM (Random Access Memory) is essentially the short-term memory of any device. It temporarily holds the data that active apps need, making sure they run swiftly because fetching data from RAM is quicker than pulling it from the device’s storage. However, RAM can fill up quickly, especially as modern apps increasingly demand more memory. This is where RAM Booster technology really proves its worth — it helps manage and tune this memory use more effectively.

RAM Booster Technology

When it comes to activities like gaming, multitasking, or running complex applications, a phone that responds swiftly and efficiently is indispensable. Enter the Nothing OS RAM Booster, a clever tool that optimises the memory in your device to ensure it operates smoothly and responsively.

The RAM Booster consists of two components: one that fine-tunes app usage and another that employs device storage as additional RAM.

Memory Guardian

Initially, the RAM Booster acts as a guardian of your smartphone’s memory, helping to keep your device chugging along nicely by relegating apps that you aren’t actively using but are still running to the background. For instance, you might have apps that you dip into now and again which are nonetheless taking up precious RAM. This could lead to sluggish performance as your RAM gets clogged with apps you’re not using at the moment.

When the RAM Booster notices apps idly running in the background — typically after a day — it shifts them from RAM to your device’s storage. This liberates some of your device’s RAM, thus the apps you actually are using have more room to breathe and can function more efficiently.

RAM Expander

Alongside this, virtual RAM technology provides additional support by enhancing your device’s physical RAM with its internal storage. This effectively transforms some of the system storage into RAM, boosting the device’s capacity. When your smartphone’s physical RAM is maxed out due to numerous apps running at once, RAM Booster watches and kicks in. It allocates a portion of the device’s internal storage to act as an overflow for the RAM.

This involves setting aside a specific part of the phone’s internal storage to create what’s essentially a swap file. Users of Nothing OS, for example, can choose to expand 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB in the settings. This space then functions like temporary RAM, allowing data to be processed just like it would be in true RAM. Although this makeshift RAM space in internal storage is slightly slower than genuine RAM (due to differences in the nature of storage memory compared to RAM), it’s immensely useful for increasing available memory.

Enhancing Performance

With these two systems in play, your phone will have more space to run current programs, support a larger number of active background applications, and enhance overall system smoothness. This also aids in maintaining consistent performance, even when you’re pushing the phone with heavy multitasking, ensuring operations stay fluid and apps respond quickly. For example, when you switch from a video call to checking emails and then to gaming, the transitions are smoother, with apps reloading and refreshing less frequently.

Turning on RAM Booster in Nothing OS

To enable RAM Booster in Nothing OS, head to: Settings > System > RAM Booster and then select the amount of RAM you want to expand.

What Next?

This is a bit of an experiment for me so let me know what you think. Too little or too much? Helpful or not? Notes are always welcome!

Last one: do you use RAM Booster? I keep it on because it’s there if I need it but would like to hear what you do.

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Update 1 – 24 May

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome, notes and questions. It’s a real pleasure to be part of this community.

Let me have a think and come back to you on your questions. I’ll speak to the engineering teams and see what we can share. I will say that if the feature isn’t what you need then there’s no issue with turning it off.

Do you use RAM Booster in Nothing OS?

Yes
No
This poll has ended.

    Justin Hi Justin, nice to meet you and thank you so much for taking the time to write up this great explanation. I didn’t really understand it fully, but feel a lot more educated 🤝 I have RAM Booster on my Phone (2a) and like you, have it on for those ‘need’ situations. I’m not a heavy gamer, but use a lot of multimedia/social media apps.

    Would also be very happy to see more of these “explained” topics when you get the chance to get your head down again.

    How does this technology differ from say a samsung phone with ram expansion or oneplus withthe same tech? Is there a difference based on hardware? I seem to experience slowness with max ram expansion enabled. Disabling it seemed to speed up the phone. Thank you for the time for writing this educational piece.

      Nice to meet you Justin.

      Thanks for taking the time to create this write up and explain RAM booster in incredible detail, it was an excellent read.

      While I do have some previous knowledge about RAM booster and it’s functionality, you’ve filled in some gaps in my knowledge and explained it in a really easy to understand way.

      I don’t use RAM Booster myself, but it’s great to know it’s got my back if I ever need it.

      So that’s how nothing developers waste time on building useless things, better optimise OS, RAM, Camera and Battery Management. Users are ready to teach you all a lesson when “Nothing Phone 3” will launch.

      I’ve noticed a difference when I’ve turned the ram booster on on my Phone 2, but it was a rather negative one:

      Device started stuttering, after clicking the volume button I had to wait for 3-5 seconds for the slider to pop-up on the screen, lock screen would become transparent and I was able to see my home screen icons before unlocking the phone and many other issues in the same manner…

      Sorry, but in it’s current state this feature makes your phone worse, there should be a better governor of which apps can go to the (much slower) phone memory instead of ram, and default system apps shouldn’t be on that list!

      Thanks for the write up, Justin.

      I utilise the RAM Booster on my Phone (1), as I only have the 8GB RAM option, so having the extra headroom is a comfort.

      Loved the explanation of the backend management of tasks too, the extra knowledge is super useful. So thank you again for breaking down the barriers.

      Ps, loved the “join the Dots” phrase 😉

      Suggestion, in the RAM Boost setting page, when it’s enabled show some info bout what app is using how much of the Boosted RAM, it will help people in selecting the amount of RAM Boost based on their usage/consumption.

      Instead of focusing on these unnecessary gimmicky features usually marketed with cheap low-end phones, focus on the actual issues like RAM management and camera quality. The current RAM management and camera quality are the worst in Nothing Phone 2.

      Coming to current state of RAM management, if I have opened say checkout page of ecommerce app/website and switch to a payment app or messages app for OTP and come back again to checkout page, most of the times it’ll reload the ecommerce app/website closing the active payment session. I have to again go through the checkout flow from scratch. I have faced this kind of issue so many times with most of the apps and is happening on 8/128 GB of Nothing Phone 2. I have not faced similar issues in the past with upper mid-range or high-end phones with >6GB of RAM. I don’t think 8 GB of RAM is too less to have at present times which can’t hold 2 basic apps in memory.

      Hi Justin,

      Thanks for putting it out in very easy to understand. I myself have gotten confused these terms at often times but I am sure I’ll remember it for longer after this.

      I am not a heavy user of the phone, I purely have 4-5 apps that I use often, otherwise WhatsApp, Spotify and YouTube are the primary contenders for that RAM space.

      I am still going to see and enable RAM booster and let’s see what value it adds.

      Cheers!

      I was trying the ram booster on my phone 2 and it made some of my less used apps stutter while opening. Without it on, the apps open perfectly.

      I can’t imagine how much it would lag on Phone 2a. If people see actual degradation in performance with it enabled, it’s functionality doesn’t matter. Sure, with it on there will be more ram free, but if the device itself feels sluggish I don’t think the overall user experience is gonna get better.

      Thanks for sharing the information.

      But I guess 12 gb RAM is enough for day to day usage. It’s better to focus on better RAM management. Coz within a few minutes, the Apps are restarting.