4 GB of RAM is increasingly becoming the cut-off mark for entry-level devices before the price goes into the middle-range category. On the higher side, we have flagships rocking upwards of 12 GB of RAM, which was unheard of in mobile devices just five years back.
However, despite smartphones getting more generous allocations of RAM, there are still devices being developed for the lowest end of the market where the price rather than the features dictate whether your smartphone will be a hit.
It is commonplace at this tier, to see devices with less than 2 GB of RAM which might be a surprise to many. With the Android operating system getting more features with every iteration, which naturally makes it harder to run on less capable hardware, Google came up with a stripped-down version of Android, dubbed Android Go, whose main objective was to run on these very entry-level smartphones that have less than ideal hardware.
Google claims that more than 250 million devices run this stripped-down version of Android. However, there are some catches, as there are quite a number of features that are missing on the streamlined version.
On Wednesday, the tech giant announced the latest version of Android Go, Android 13 Go, which will sadly require more power than its predecessors, the most notable being at least 2 GB of RAM.
This is a huge change, as for years, Google marketed Android Go as an operating system built for devices with less than 2 GB of RAM. For comparison, Android 11 Go and 12 Go had a minimum requirement of only 1 GB of RAM
“Small bit of news here: Google is upping the minimum hardware requirements that handheld devices must meet in order to be able to bundle GMS. Now, all handheld devices launching with Android 13+ must have at least 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of flash storage in order to preload GMS,” explains Android expert Mishaal Rahman on Twitter.
As hinted by the name, Android 13 Go is based on Android 13 and adds a version of the Material You system that lets you pick one of four colour schemes based on your wallpaper.
Android 13 Go will also introduce the new streamlined Google Play System Updates system, which we covered in a previous article. In a nutshell, the seamless updates work by downloading your updates in the background while you continue to use your phone.
Once the download process is complete, a simple reboot will then boot your phone into the updated system, leaving behind what you have been using in the background to be deleted and the space to be freed.
It is a departure from the traditional update system where your phone would stay in an unusable state for a whole hour or so, as it downloads and installs a new Android version.
Google concludes by saying that phones with Android 13 Go will start appearing at the start of 2023, which might mean for those rocking older versions of Android Go at the moment, most of them will only be able to update their OS to Android 12 Go with Android 13 Go now out of their device’s capabilities.
