TV streaming devices don’t need to be powerhouses. But they can’t really be a breeze either, especially when we’re talking about smooth playback of 4K videos, and especially with how cumbersome and cumbersome streaming apps are. That’s why Google’s latest change to the Android TV platform is a bit confusing. In a strange move, this actually reduced the RAM requirements for Android TV, from 1.5GB to just 1GB of memory.
Android Authority bases this claim on its recent commitments to the Android Open Source Project. Virtualized versions for Android TV can now have as little as 1GB of RAM, although you’ll need 2GB if you want the full Google TV experience (which is a separate user interface with additional features running on Android TV). To set your expectations, the latest version of the Google TV streamer has 4 GB and the very old Nvidia Shield TV has 2 GB. The upgraded SHIELD TV Pro has 3 GB.
I suspect the move is aimed at motivating more manufacturers to release Android TV and Google TV products, attracting them with lower and cheaper hardware requirements. The Walmart-branded Onn streamer with Android TV, for example, costs just $20, and a 4K upgrade version costs $50. But even these very affordable devices have 2 GB and 3 GB of RAM, respectively. So I can’t imagine a company trying to run modern Android apps focused on smooth video on a single GB of RAM. My Nvidia Shield (again, very old, but running new software) tends to work on apps like Max and Paramount+.
There’s another angle: smart TVs. Many TVs eliminate the middleman of a streaming box and simply load a TV’s internal electronics with an existing smart TV platform, like Roku, Amazon Fire, or even Android TV. Reducing the hardware required to run Android TV could be a play to expand the platform and its lucrative access to Play Store apps to much cheaper TV sales.
And since many budget TV buyers basically expect the built-in software to be crap (they buy it to plug in a game console or stay in a retail space), few customers would notice really that the software they are ignoring is running out of memory. Too bad for people who buy it cheap and actually want to use these smart TV features I guess.
This would bother me a lot less if the aforementioned TV streaming apps didn’t get bigger, slower, and heavier. This seems like the time for Google to raise its standards, not lower them, especially since the mobile memory that goes into these streaming boxes isn’t exactly an expensive component. In the words of a legendary ham, “DISAPPOINTED!” “.
