You may wonder whether these applications are really effective?
What role does RAM play on Android?
Before learning how system cleaning applications work, we need to understand what RAM is and its role on the phone.
Operating systems (both Windows and Android) use RAM to store active applications.
RAM is volatile storage, so every time you turn off your phone, everything stored in it is erased.
How does Android use RAM?
You may think that your phone has too much RAM so you need to manage it manually.
On Windows, the operating system will keep free space in RAM for future work by other programs.
Even SSDs are still much slower than RAM, so when Windows switches to using page files you’ll notice a significant slowdown.
However, Android uses RAM in a completely different way.
With Android, applications you have opened will be kept in RAM until a new application needs space in RAM.
Example of Android’s RAM usage
Let’s say you have an Android phone with 4GB of RAM and each app needs 1GB.
Now, let’s say you open 4 apps and use each app for 1 minute.
If you open 5 or more apps, the 5th app has exceeded your phone’s RAM capacity.
Thanks to that, Android will remove the least important application on RAM to leave room for the application you just opened.
Why are system cleaning applications harmful to Android?
Once we understand how Android uses RAM, we can see how applications that clean up the system affect device performance.
Most system cleaning applications work in the following way: first the application will tell you which applications are active and how much RAM they are taking up, then it will suggest you to free up RAM by
The problem is that when you completely stop the operation of those applications, they will have to restart from the beginning when you open them again.
Therefore, forcing application shutdown consumes more resources than leaving them in RAM and you can quickly reopen them when needed.
Continuing with the example above, you opened 4 apps and Android saved them on RAM.
This makes no sense, if you plan to reopen these applications later there is no benefit to cleaning RAM memory.
In addition, some system cleaning applications also automatically run in the background and force stop other applications according to the available schedule.
Turning off the application manually is also not necessary
Even if you don’t use a system cleaning app, there are default Android features that do the same thing.
If you swipe an app’s frame straight up from the Recents page, you’ll remove it from the page and stop the app from working at the same time.
This is not necessary!
Let’s define the Recents page as just a feature that helps you switch between apps easily.
Never use cleaning apps on your phone!
If cleaning applications on Android phones are light, they are useless, and if they are heavy, they can even harm your device.