Free Memory Stabalizes iPhone Application Crashes

Free Memory 1.4 for the iPhone is such a useful utility that it really makes you stop and wonder why this functionality hasn't already been built into the iPhone.

Have you ever been browsing a web page through Safari only to have it close in the middle of using it? How about scrolling through your friends Facebook updates only to have it crash on you? Any user who has put in a decent amount of time using applications downloaded from the iTunes App Store knows exactly what I am talking about. Thankfully, Recession Apps, developer of the Free Memory iPhone application, knew our pain all too well. They have given us an application that puts an end to our issues.

The purpose of Free Memory, as you may have guessed from its name, is to allow users to free up memory on the iPhone. This allows all of your applications to run more smoothly. Some of you may be thinking "but I thought my iPhone came with 16 GB of memory and I'm not using even half of it, so why do I need this application?" The answer to this is that the 16 GB refers to storage space, while "memory" in this case references the 128 MB of RAM that is built into every iPhone. Every application, while its running, uses a chunk of that 128 MB of RAM. When the application closes all the RAM is supposed to be relinquished back so that other applications can use that RAM. What actually happens behind the scenes when your application closes is that it requests usage of a specific amount of RAM and the iPhone says "no way there's not enough, I'm going to shut you down before you cause the entire phone to stop working."

At any time, load up the Free Memory application and it will display the current amount of memory that's free, a list of processes on your iPhone (for the technically inclined) and a big button that says "Free Memory". As soon as you hit the "Free Memory" button, the application does its thing and frees up to 20 MB of memory, allowing your iPhone applications to run without crashing. The process could not be simpler and it is as close to an iPhone application miracle cure-all that you can get! Remembering to use the application often turns out to be the biggest challenge.