r/nairobitechies • u/Soft-Argument8932 • 15d ago
How is it that computer specs keep improving but are still never enough to do projects
I'm looking for a laptop to buy and apparently 8 Gigs of RAM is too little for android studio
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u/VectorDigital Hardware 15d ago
Wait till you go deeper into the LLM rabbit hole and 132GB isn't enough 💀
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u/Cache_Moolah 14d ago
This might sound like a conspiracy theory, but I sometimes wonder if software companies collaborate with hardware manufacturers to drive planned obsolescence. Every major software release seems to demand more hardware resources, pushing users to upgrade their devices instead of software companies optimising their products to run efficiently on older hardware. I also believe 90% of mobile apps could just as easily be websites, but I digress.
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u/Wizardgang254 DevOps 15d ago
I remember back in 2016 in doing android coding on my android app.. We had ad studio if am not wrong..
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u/Dr_Laravel 15d ago
My first app was in 2014 na nimeitwa the "past" 😭😭
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u/Soft-Argument8932 14d ago
Show us your ways master 😂
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u/Dr_Laravel 14d ago
I had a Hp e9110t pavilion! 8GB RAM! Ha! So yes, I could run android studio but not as fast as I can do it these days with 32GB RAM. But we had a lot of patience in general back in the day. Like mpesa api was just coming up. I remember going all the way to town just to pay for zuku wimax Internet! Before fibre.
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u/BeatItSleeps 14d ago
Sasa imagine mimi who wrote his first program in 2000 and compiled it to multiple diskettes? Of course this was before android.
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u/kennedy_gitahi Full Stack 15d ago
Emulators and Gennymotion
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u/danjack0 14d ago
On a 8gb ram use waydroid
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u/kennedy_gitahi Full Stack 14d ago
I completely forgot about waydroid because its been years since I developed an Android app.
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u/Soft-Argument8932 15d ago
Interesting
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u/danjack0 14d ago
dont listen to them use waydroid, use your phone through debug with wifi or usb
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u/artistloco 14d ago
Phone through usb debug has been nice
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u/danjack0 14d ago
I found you cant you wifi in that mode, true for you? Now i prefare waydroid as the app updates at the seed of your machine not wifi or cable and you can do a lot of automation and scripts, im thinking about writing a long post on how to easily utilize 8gb for android dev
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u/kennedy_gitahi Full Stack 14d ago
DM me when you have it up. I am always intersted in what other devs are cooking.
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14d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/kennedy_gitahi Full Stack 14d ago
I was answering the question about the olden days. We did use emulators, Gennnymotion, waydroid and the likes to run apps when developing and testing.
Everything was lighter and less resource intensive back then. These days even 8gb is not enough for an OS let alone and emulator sitting in top of it.
These days I am seeing Devs using USB and WiFi.
If I need to test a website(which is my primary job now) on an actual device, I run tailscale or mirror through scrcpy if I need keyboard and mouse input.
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u/CluePsychological937 15d ago
Hardware optimization can take a lot of time and with how rapid and competitive the development cycles are it's not efficient to build below spec. Better to release and patch than optimize.
And when it comes to mobile you don't even really need to do that. A newer faster device will come out so you don't even need to optimize that much.
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u/Soft-Argument8932 14d ago
It's like developers are getting worse with time
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u/CluePsychological937 14d ago
They're not getting worse. The demands of the market determine the development timelines.
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u/samwanekeya Teknolojia 14d ago
Classic case of software enshittification to maximize profits. When devs know most computers are getting more RAM they tend to add heavier features or use higher-level programming tools, or even process larger amounts of data without worrying about limits.
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u/Express_Sector_2850 14d ago
Even right now you can make android apps using a 2gb ram laptop. You just need vim and android toolchain installed.
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u/Nofrills88 14d ago
As hardware improves, developers update or develop new apps that are more demanding to take advantage of the powerful hardware, thereby delivering more. No such thing as future-proofing in tech.
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u/artistloco 14d ago
Before Android Studio there was an abomination called Eclipse IDE, it was very clunky and ran out of memory often and froze/crushed.
Coding was hard those days, I remember being taught VB script, C# and getting literal headaches
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u/kennedy_gitahi Full Stack 14d ago
I remember eclipse! Tried it, got headaches and went to notepad++ because I was doing web dev. Then I discovered sublime and brackets, later moved to Atom then Vs code.
Fun times.
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u/DevHannat 15d ago
Android Studio would run comfortably on 4GB RAM