You may have seen “Extended RAM” in your Android phone’s settings or specs sheet. Some companies call it RAM Plus, Virtual RAM, Memory Fusion, Dynamic Memory, or Expanded RAM. The feature supposedly “adds” additional memory to your phone. Let’s find out how (and if) it actually works.

What is extended RAM

When you download an app, your phone stores it in the internal storage. But when you open the app, it has to load it into the temporary storage while you’re using it. That’s because the internal storage isn’t fast enough to run the app. The temporary storage is your phone’s RAM. And it’s much faster than flash storage. The more RAM you have, the more apps you can keep open without stuttering or lagging.

Extended RAM is not a part of the fast temporary storage. It is actually just a piece of slower internal storage that has been repurposed as RAM, so to speak. When companies market a phone’s storage as 8GB + 5GB, that extra 5GB is simply taken from the internal storage. So if the phone’s internal storage is 128GB, you only have 123GB available (not counting the space required by the operating system). The rest is reserved for the Extended Storage feature. The RAM extension feature gets its own partition in the phone’s internal storage, which is why you can also adjust the size in the phone’s settings.

How does it work on Android

Many Android phones and tablets that offer virtual RAM expansion have it enabled by default. And you can change how much space the feature takes up in the phone settings. Most phones also let you disable it. On some older devices, you may need to modify the settings menu using ADB to disable it. Here’s how it works.

When you quit an app, the Android system doesn’t kill it immediately. It keeps the app active in the background so it loads faster next time. That’s why you shouldn’t close apps. The same thing happens with every app you use. Android’s memory management decides which apps to quit and when. Most apps stay loaded in RAM, so it’s almost always full.

What happens if you open another app when almost all of your RAM is occupied? The system automatically kills a low-priority app (it intelligently sorts them) to free up memory. This is where virtual RAM comes in. If it’s available, the system moves the low-priority app to the special partition instead of killing it. The next time you open it, it will pull it from virtual RAM instead. This makes it easier to pick up where you left off.

That’s all virtual RAM does. It’s a temporary space where Android stores low-priority apps when it’s running low on memory.

What extended RAM cannot do

Now that you know what extended RAM actually is and how it works, it should be easy to understand why it can’t replace physical RAM. Apps are never loaded directly onto it, they’re just swapped out, so even if your phone had 8GB of virtual RAM, it wouldn’t improve its performance. Flash storage is much, much slower than physical RAM (even the latest UFS 3.1 standard can’t keep up). Active apps never run on flash storage.

That’s why games or other resource-intensive apps won’t run faster when virtual memory is enabled. Quite the opposite. Since moving apps back and forth between physical RAM and internal storage takes time and processing power, virtual RAM can potentially slow down performance. While this is happening in the background, you may notice FPS drops and throttling. Killing low-priority apps is faster than moving them.

Second, a phone’s internal memory has a limited lifespan as it gets weaker with each read/write cycle. Virtual RAM eats up that lifespan just to keep inactive apps running in the background. Plus, you have much less memory available for your personal use.

Is it just a gimmick?

For modern phones with 8GB or 12GB of internal storage, expanded RAM doesn’t do much good. At best, it can be useless and at worst, it can be a hindrance. For older, cheaper phones with less than 8GB of storage, expanded RAM can help with multitasking. These phones run out of memory more quickly, so it makes sense to offload inactive apps to storage. Depending on the context, expanded RAM can be a gimmick. In either case, it won’t make your phone or your apps any faster.

Extended RAM is not real RAM and will not make your phone faster. But it will improve multitasking on older phones with low-end hardware.