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.
[Google Code, via Phandroid]