Windows 10, for phones, vs Android Marshmallow (developer, technical question)?

[Christopher Kendalls]

Windows 10, for phones, vs Android Marshmallow (developer, technical question)

I've been contemplating moving back to Android, because Lollipop addressed everything I hated about Android back in the Jellybean days. And Lollipop phones are as cheap as $30 these days. But for those who know, which is probably going to be developers that program for Android AND Windows Phone, is Windows 10 better than Android Marshmallow?

I ask this because I've read about features like Flex Storage, and Doze, which again, address concerns I had with Android back in the day, such as apps exhausting all available RAM, and prolonging battery life. We all know that while you can move apps to SD, that is not the same thing as having the SD card available to you as RAM. Even if an app was moved to SD, Android still split memory usage between the SD card and internal RAM.

Is Flex Storage a better way to move apps to SD, or does it only kick in when you use up all of your available RAM; can I use Flex Storage AND move apps to SD? One thing I've noticed is that it requires the device to be reformatted; really reminds me of Superfetch (from the Microsoft Vista days). Another concern, is that if I were to use Flex Storage, do I still have the SD card available to store pictures, video, music, and documents? With Superfetch the entire amount was used and you couldn't use the USB drive for anything else. That wasn't really an issue because of the hard drive, but you get where I'm going with this.

While these features, and others in Marshmallow, sound neat, I haven't heard of what is avaliable to us in Windows 10 that does the same, or are these just Android implementations of old features that were available in Windows Phone 8.1, or 8, or 7? Who is catching up with the other, or just two different sides of the same coin.

If Android devices have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM anyway, unless I have too many apps open what is the likelihood I'll even need Flex Storage? And is there anything like Doze in Windows 10 for phones?

 

[xandros9]

Flex Storage/Adoptable Storage is NOT related to RAM. RAM is the temporary workspace, actual storage space, like for music, is what's in question here.

It is a feature used for taking an SD card and making it act like internal memory. I wouldn't call it necessarily better than 8.1's implementation, but its different.
Android's SD adoption makes the card essentially part of the phone and cannot be switched out. Pretend the card is physically absorbed by the phone.

It does not affect RAM usage whatsoever. It'll be hella slow anyway if it did. (see virtual memory)

As for Doze, its a feature to improve standby battery life when the phone is left on a surface for a while. It's not going to be an end-all battery feature. As for something like Doze on Windows Phone, we can't compare because the two mobile OSes work dramatically differently under-the-hood.

 

[Christopher Kendalls]

I would like to see these features on Windows Phone. Thanks for responding; I figured that someone would eventually have something interesting to add.

 

[xandros9]

I would like to see these features on Windows Phone. Thanks for responding; I figured that someone would eventually have something interesting to add.

Windows Phone already has capable SD support and Doze is an Android solution to fix an Android problem, which may or may not even translate properly to Windows Phone or iOS as they all handle things differently.

 

[Christopher Kendalls]

I know that I can store apps on SD if the developer enables it. And I already use SD to store media. But I'm saying that I would be interested to see how Windows Phone would operate if something like Flex Storage were an option. For example HERE Maps will only allow you to store the maps on Internal Memory. The way that Flex Storage is explained, if we used our SD cards in that way in Windows Phone you could use your SD card to store the maps because the phone would treat all storage the same. That is a major differentiation over the way that SD cards are used on Windows Phones, assuming that I am understanding Flex Storage correctly.

I'm not diminishing the SD card support on Windows Phone. It was nice to be able to get around the way in which Android handled apps on SD back in the day. I'm just suggesting that for those of us with only 8 GB of internal storage it would be nice to have options. Windows Phone also writes to the internal memory before caching data to the SD card. So even if you have a GB of internal memory to play with, if you're trying to cache to SD, say, podcasts through the Podcasts app, or music files through an app like CloudMuzik or Spotify, it wants to use internal memory temporarily before the data is ultimately written to SD. Android may do this anyway, I'm not sure; I haven't used an Android as my daily driver since Jellybean, but it puts me in a position of trying to keep at least 500 MB free of internal storage, just in case. It is the reason I don't store maps on my phone. This may be an issue with low RAM on budget Windows Phones, I don't know.

I realize that this is slow, and painful. But that is the price to pay for relying on SD, in general, and users are already well aware of this. It isn't like my apps that I do run off of SD respond quickly as it is.