TV streaming devices don’t have to be powerhouses. But they can’t be much of a pushover either, especially when we’re talking about smooth 4K video playback, and especially how heavy and bloated streaming apps are becoming. That’s why Google’s latest change to the Android TV platform is a bit baffling. In a strange move, it actually lowered the RAM requirement for Android TV, from 1.5 GB to just 1 GB of memory.
Android Authority bases this claim on recent commitments to the Android Open Source Project. Virtualized builds 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 UI with some additional features running on top of Android TV). To meet 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 this move is trying to motivate more manufacturers to release Android TV and Google TV products, enticing them with lower and cheaper hardware requirements. For example, Walmart’s store-brand Onn streamer with Android TV costs just $20, and a 4K upgrade version costs $50. But even these super-affordable devices have 2GB and 3GB of RAM, respectively. So I can’t imagine any company trying to run modern Android apps that focus on smooth video on just one gigabyte of RAM. My Nvidia Shield (again a very old one, but with new software) tends to run apps like Max and Paramount+.
There’s another angle: smart TVs. Many televisions cut out the middleman of a streaming box and simply charge a TV’s internal electronics using an existing smart TV platform, such as Roku, Amazon Fire, or even Android TV. Reducing the hardware needed to run Android TV could be a way to spread the platform and lucrative access to apps on the Play Store to much cheaper TV sales.
And since many budget TV buyers essentially expect integrated software to be worthless (they buy it to hook up a gaming console or place in a retail space), not many customers would actually notice that the software they’re ignoring is hungry for memory. Too bad for the people who buy it for a low price and actually want to use those smart TV functions, I think.
This would bother me a lot less if the aforementioned TV streaming apps didn’t get bigger, slower, and more cumbersome. This seems like a time for Google to raise its standards and not lower them, especially since the mobile memory that goes into these streaming boxes isn’t exactly an expensive item. In the words of a legendary ham: “DISAPPOINTED!.”