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The OnePlus 3 was announced last week with much excitement from the community, and rightfully so given that it packs a considerable amount of RAM under the hood alongside all those other pretty powerful specifications. While 6GB of RAM is certainly a lot, it quickly became apparent that OnePlus had designed the phone to handle and manage RAM in specific way that had users thinking at first that there was an issue with the RAM. OnePlus states that the RAM management is designed this way, so while there is no issue, it is still seemingly a problem for some users. Over the past few days following the OnePlus 3 launch at the beginning of last week, a “fix” has been laid out that allows users to take back their extra RAM for use with the device. It was after this RAM fix that the OnePlus 3 was tested against the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge with some perhaps surprising, perhaps not surprising results.
If you own a OnePlus 3 and are having issues with the way the RAM works, you can apply these changes to your own device and get back some of that extra RAM for user with apps and other functions, which should be especially useful given that it has 6GB of RAM onboard. However it is also worth noting that OnePlus’ reason for implementing RAM management in the way that they did was to help save on battery, so users should keep in mind that battery life may decrease if they make any changes.
To get things started, you’ll have to find some specific lines of code in the build.prop of your device and change some of these values to get the improvements to the RAM management that are outlined by this particular fix. While it isn’t required that you have root to do this, you can do it with a rooted device and root specific apps like Root Explorer or BuildProp Editor, which, will likely be a lot easier than doing things through ADB. It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t something you should attempt if you aren’t familiar with these types of processes, and in that case a better solution may be to wait until a ROM comes along that offers up a method for RAM management that is to your liking. If you’re all set to go ahead with the changes, you’re looking specifically for this line “ro.sys.fw.bg_apps_limit=20” (without the quotes, of course) in the build.prop, and you’ll want to change the number at the end of that line, in this case 20, to a higher number. A specific higher number is not mentioned, so anything higher than 20 (within reason) should kick back results. Once everything is all said and done, the number of background apps that the OnePlus 3 can hold should increase to a noticeable degree.