iPhone 7 ram memory full

Hey giostramonium,

Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities. I understand that you’re seeing an alert about full memory and I’d like to help.

It looks like you’re experiencing a full memory issue rather than your iPhone storage. You have plenty of storage left but the memory may be used up. 

I recommend that you close out your apps after you’re done using them by following the steps from here: How to force an app to close on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch  

Your storage of 128GB is how much the device can hold/save the data from your device and your ram is how much your device can handle having multiple apps opened at the same time. 

I hope this helps! Cheers!

Is your iPhone up to date with software. If not, make sure to update to the latest available software.

giostramonium wrote:

Yet every time I switch from one app to the other, this one will load again from scratch.

How do you switch between two apps? Or differently, do you keep previously used apps running in background? Saying this when you switch between apps is previously used app still visible in App Switcher screen?

Apps that are fully closed (quitted), would need to reload fully next time are open. Same might happened when app was not in used for some time or when other app uses a lot of memory resources.

Hey giostramonium,

Thanks for getting back to us with more information. We appreciate it!

It sounds like you're experiencing apps reloading every time you switch from one app to another. This can actually happen with Background App Refresh enabled. You can locate this under Settings > General > Background App Refresh. If it's already disabled, then try toggling it by enabling it and then disabling it again. You can also choose the apps that you wish to enable Background App Refresh and disable some that you don't want. Let me know if this helps.

For your Mail app issue, are you receiving any error messages when trying to load the Mail app? If not, what exactly happens when you try to launch the app? The more information you can provide me, the better I can assist you.

Cheers!

You don’t really understand how the phone uses RAM. Your iPhone 7 has 2 GB of RAM. iOS uses about half of it. All of the other apps must share the remaining 1 GB. Which means that probably no more than 2 or 3 apps are in RAM at the same time, regardless of how many appear in the app switcher (which is just a list of apps that have been run; it is not an indication of what is currently running). So iOS pages out apps that are suspended (which means ALL apps that show in the task switcher except for the current one) to make room whenever an app needs RAM. Further, apps are not monolithic. Each app is composed of a large number of code segments and data which can be switched in and out as needed. This process is called virtual memory management. It works very well, as the basic design goes back to the origins of Unix in the 1970’s, and it has been constantly refined over time. No app can improve on this process; any app that tries simply makes the situation worse. So get rid of whatever app you have that is trying to do a better job than iOS.

Also, don’t kill apps in the task switcher. That just slows down your phone and wastes energy as apps get reloaded from scratch.

Here’s an article from 8 years ago that is still one of the best I have seen on this

subject—>https://www.speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html

Oh, and your mail problem has nothing to do with memory management. That sounds more like a communication problem with the mail server.

As I said, your mail problem has nothing to do with RAM. It is most likely a communications problem with your mail server, or mail settings. what kind of mail account?

And did you get rid of whatever app is trying to manage RAM? RAM SHOULD always be full, BTW. If it isn’t the phone is not using RAM effectively.

For AirDrop, go to Settings/General/Airdrop and set it to Everyone. for Airdrop to work you must have both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled, and the participating devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network.

If you are not connected to Wi-Fi Airdrop will be disabled. Also if no Apple device that is enabled for Airdrop is within range. Do you have a company email account on your phone? If you do the company can disable Airdrop.

Then your phone is probably broken. Make a genius bar appointment to have it checked out.