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Unable to shuffle between a few apps at a time on your Pixel 3? You’re not alone
June 08, 2025
ThePixel 3 and Pixel 3 XLmay be two of thebest Android smartphonesyou can buy, but they are not without their issues. One of them looks to be an inability to move between a handful of apps at a time without one closing out, especially when you have music playing in the background.
This does not seem to be an isolated issue, either. At leastthreethreadson Redditcomplain about the Pixel 3’s alleged memory management issue.MultiplepostsonTwitterecho the same concern, with folks only able to open two to four apps before one of them eventually closes in the background.
The memory management issue seemingly gets worse when you use the camera. As we found on our own Pixel 3 XL, we had Pocket Casts close several times when we took some pictures. The same thing happened when we used Play Music and Spotify.
What makes matters worse is we do not know why this issue exists. Most people blame the Pixel 3’s 4GB of RAM. When compared to phones like theOnePlus 6andSamsung Galaxy Note 9, which feature at least 6GB of RAM, the Pixel 3’s RAM count is mediocre and possibly worrisome for the future.
Alternatively, Flash Kernel developer Nathan Chancellor believes the memory management issue is due toGoogle’sswitch toAndroid Low Memory Killer Daemon(lmkd). This is a process monitoring memory state that kills the least essential process or processes in order to better react to high memory pressure and keep Android running as smoothly as possible.
Chancellor believes that Google simply needs to further tune and fix lmkd for the Pixel 3. He also said that Sultan, a popular Android developer on XDA Developers, tried the switch on the Pixel 2 and found the same memory management issue.
Whatever the reason, we can only hope that Google pushes out some sort of fix in a future update. We know that not everyone will see the same issue, but enough people have complained about the same thing to hopefully warrant some sort of deep look.
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