Ever think to change my old android smartphone into a much better one, however, the android market seems to change very fast, in every year you will see how many new android devices being shipped with their new technology, hardware, and new operating system, which is IMHO I don’t think that the enhancement they made, is having a big difference in a way I use my phone. So I somehow manage to wait for another 3 or 5 years for replacing my devices.

Over time years passed, I will need to update the phone operating system that will take a lot of hardware resources especially RAM/Memory consumption. I still using Nexus S ( 384mb RAM ) as my current daily use phone, connected to my Pebble smartwatch, and CyanogenMod 11 (KitKat 4.4.2) ROM installed, I’m not using the original Android ROM since google stop OTA update after JellyBean (4.3.1).

In this post I’m going to share my experience and tips how I manage to use a very small RAM usage on Nexus S. You will need to download some nifty little app from Play Store and tweaking some of your android settings,

  1. Use a Memory Management app to monitor your RAM usage. You may look into the PlayStore for this kind of app, there are so many options, I currently use one from Imoblife. Inc, it’s quite reliable and it could monitor running background service that was not listed on the default setting of android App Management. This app also has a simple shortcut to free-ing RAM directly from the notification bar, very simple.
  2. Turn off Google Now feature. I like this feature, good enough to provide you with realtime information such as traffic, weather, etc based on your realtime position, time, and condition. However, it took a lot of memory usage bcoz of all information is delivered in a realtime process.
  3. Turn off Google reporting location system In addition to using your GPS, Android collects location data from 3G Tower or nearby Wi-Fi routers. Scanning for Wi-Fi this way uses up RAM and your battery life. To turn off location reporting.
  4. Don’t use any application widget. App widget might extremely drain your RAM and also your battery life, considering not using a lot of widgets or don’t use any widget at all is the best way to keep your memory usage low. You may check with memory booster if you wanna know how much memory is used by all widgets.
  5. Use default launcher from Android stock only. Having a custom launcher is great but how big they eat your RAM is great too. I know they may advertise with lite memory usage, slick, fast but actually, it takes additional RAM usage no matter how small memory being used by custom launcher.
  6. Hibernate some running service that you don’t use. You might want to hibernate (long sleep but not dead) some of your apps that always running in the background eating your RAM and battery life, Greenify is the right app to do this job, the app itself is not a task killer or disabler, it doesn’t “freeze” apps.
  7. Disable Google background Service that always running without your consent. Somehow while you monitoring your RAM usage you see a system background service such as Google Backup Transport that always running in the background eating a lot of rams even you’re not using the Google backup feature. Take a look at Disable Service app, this app helps to disable services running in the background! (Root access needed).

I’m having a good result when applying all of those steps and manage less 100mb free RAM on my Nexus S. I don’t do gaming on my phone either using so many social network application. I have Twitter, Path, and Foursquare on my phone and still have a lot of free memory. Just Try it, there will be a big difference.