Virtual RAM won’t save smartphones from the memory crisis

Jan Johannsen

20.4.2026

Translation: Katherine Martin

The ongoing memory crisis is making smartphones more expensive too. But virtual RAM won’t help bring prices back down.

Plenty of Android smartphone manufacturers have been offering virtual RAM for a while now. Personally, I’ve never really looked into it. But given the price increases prompted by the memory crisis, I wondered if virtual RAM might be a lifeline.

What is virtual RAM?

RAM Plus, RAM expansion, Dynamic RAM Expansion, virtual RAM – they’re all different names for the same technology. Put simply, virtual RAM reserves a portion of a device’s data storage. If a smartphone’s internal RAM is fully utilised, the virtual space kicks in and performs RAM tasks. These typically involve data from background processes or inactive apps.

For instance, you can expand the [Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s](/page/nothing-phone-4a-pro-im-test-der-aufpreis-lohnt-sich-41981 12 gigabytes (GB) of RAM by up to eight virtual GB. Mind you, I already feel like 12 GB is plenty. Basically, a manufacturer could give a device just four GB of RAM, then offer a virtual expansion.

Samsung has done this with the Galaxy A17, for example. Its four GB of RAM is expanded by four virtual GB by default. The same approach is sometimes used for laptops, the MacBook Neo being a prominent, recent example.

The advantages of virtual RAM

Virtual RAM isn’t in the same league as actual RAM. It’s based on flash memory, which is significantly slower than physical RAM when it comes to read and write operations. As a result, it’s used for background processes, not for active applications. In theory, virtual memory’s useful if your smartphone runs slowly while multitasking, as it can help apps wake up from the background more quickly. If that’s not a problem for you, virtual memory isn’t worth it.

After running several benchmarks on the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and the Samsung Galaxy A17, I didn’t notice any benefits of using virtual RAM. Although the applications didn’t test the RAM directly, I’m surprised that it had no influence over the results. Based on the average of several benchmarks (3DMark, Antutu and Geekbench), the Phone (4a), with eight GB of virtual RAM, achieves a one-per-cent increase in CPU and GPU performance. That falls within the margin of error.

The Galaxy A17 followed a similar pattern, although its five-per-cent increase in CPU performance using virtual RAM puts it slightly out of the margin of error. However, it made no difference to the GPU figures in percentage terms. When I use my phone with several apps open, I don’t feel like apps come out of the background any faster with virtual RAM enabled.

Hoping to feel the effects of the virtual memory, I opened 99 browser tabs – the maximum possible. This meant the browser was using 1.7 gigabytes of RAM, and the already slow phone didn’t get any faster. Even with this baseline load, I didn’t notice any difference in how the Galaxy A17 performed with or without virtual RAM.

Virtual memory offers no noticeable benefits. In fact, it might even have some drawbacks. After all, the storage space reserved for it stops being available to you for your data. When your storage space is running low due to apps, photos and videos, every gigabyte counts. What’s more, since the flash memory’s constantly being read from and written to at that location, its lifespan shortens. That being said, it’s likely you’ll replace your smartphone for other reasons before the increased strain on its memory becomes noticeable.

No solution to the memory crisis

I don’t see any advantages to using virtual RAM on smartphones. There’s not even a slight improvement when I bring up an app from the background. It’s no substitute for actual RAM, nor is it a viable way of keeping smartphone prices low during the memory crisis. Now that I’ve looked into the issue thoroughly, I’ll continue to ignore virtual memory in my reporting and reviews, just as I have in the past.

Jan Johannsen

Senior Editor

Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.de

As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus. more

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