It’s a cycle we’re familiar with. You update your phone to the latest version of iOS and Android and suddenly your once-agile device is somehow running slower. It can be hard to tell if it’s just your mind playing tricks or something is actually amiss, but for Android 6.0 users doubting their sanity, it’s definitely real.
A report from last year on Google’s bug tracker for Android confirmed that Marshmallow (and even Lollipop) suffers from a trickling memory leak.
According to the report, over the course of a month, available memory will steadily drop for no apparent reason until the device has no choice but to automatically reboot.
If you’re not sure if you’ve suffered from the problem, the report includes a list of symptoms:
– Launcher redrawing constantly when returning from home screen.
– Music apps get terminated for no reason in background, and you end up thinking your earbuds died.
– Multi-tasking is virtually impossible, because the apps reload upon launching them, thus losing all your input info, like text, for example.
The source of the memory leak appears to be the “System UI” process.
After a lot of back and forth, a fix for the bug has been sorted and “will be available in a future build”, going by a comment yesterday from an Android developer.
No definitive date is provided, though the original bug poster speculates it should come with July’s security update.
Memory leak (System UI) – Android 6.0 MRA58K [Google Code, via Phandroid]
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo Australia.
Comments
4 responses to “Google Fixes 6 Month Old Android Marshmallow Memory Leak”
Sucks if you’re stuck on a Samsung device more than 12 months after product release when Samsung drops support for all products… So you get stuck on the buggy version..
After a phone goes out of contract, I install CyanogenMod so I can keep Android up to date without having to fork another grand for a new phone.
I’m running Marshmallow on an S4, and I haven’t seen any hardware improvements on any model since to make me want to upgrade.
I’ll do the same… It’s pretty weak that Samsung’s policy is to drop support only 12 months after product release.
I have my phone set to reboot once a week
Great but it shouldn’t have taken Google this long on a fix for such a stifling performance impacting issue.