OnePlus Purposefully Gimped OnePlus 3’s 6GB RAM To Improve Battery Performance, Here's How To Unlock it

The OnePlus 3 is one of the hottest phones going at the moment. It offers a serious punch for its $400 asking price, and like all other OnePlus models before it, we expect it to be snatched up quickly by those who want something a little different, and get involved in an ecosystem where the phone vendor doesn't mind when its users want to get their hands a little dirty.

And well, if you have a OnePlus 3 and were really looking forward to that 6GB of memory offered, you will have to get your hands dirty. It's not easy to understand exactly why OnePlus limits the RAM usage when it boasts offering 6GB, but it could be that it'd require very specific scenarios to actually require the phone to dip into its extra resources. Ultimately, OnePlus limits things in the quest for improved battery life, something company co-founder Carl Pei confirmed on Twitter.

.@LucaDuci we have a different strategy for RAM management that benefits battery. We think this is the best user experience.

— Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 17, 2016

As it turns out, it doesn't require that much effort to increase the amount of memory used on the OnePlus. If you have root access, running the tweak should be simple, but XDA's Mario Tomás Serrafero suggests that this should be possible through Android's ADB interface (meaning the phone would have to be connected to a PC).

Ultimately, you'll want to find and edit a file called 'build.prop', which is found in the /system/ folder. Inside, a line similar to 'ro.sys.fw.bg_apps_limits=20' will be seen. All you have to do to increase memory usage is to increase that number. With the default of 20, Serrafero found that he could open 12 apps total before the first one would be kicked from memory. When the value was set to 42, the max app count became 22 - a major improvement.

As with all tweaks, this one needs to be done with a bit of caution. OnePlus limits the memory usage by default to improve battery life, so it stands to reason that if you remove the limit and begin storing even more in memory, you will decrease your overall battery-life. Fortunately, you can choose to go one way or the other; if you're happy with the default, you may as well stick with it!