While Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has by no means been among the top skins to be implemented by manufacturers, the Korean company has never given up on improving the custom Android interface. Most of the criticism revolves around the effects TouchWiz can have on the fluidity of a device’s interface, as well as the overall appearance the company imposes on their users. With the latest Galaxy S6 smartphones, Samsung has shipped a newer version of the TouchWiz interface, which Samsung claims is both lighter in system resource consumption, as well as a more refined experience.
What comes under question though is the background memory management parameters Samsung has implemented with their latest flagships. Users have been complaining that apps are failing to remain in memory for multitasking. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy S6 software is so aggressive in freeing up memory that several users are reporting that applications are closing even when only using two at a time. This means that even when users are attempting to something as simple as switching between messages and web browsing in Chrome, they are finding that Chrome has closed. While initially it was believed to be an issue tied with some of the reported memory leak issues of Android Lollipop, reports are now indicating that it is indeed due to tweaks implemented by Samsung. This conclusion has been reached because insider reports say Samsung plans to issue an official fix for the RAM management issue with the release of the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus.
While this news should give hope to Galaxy S6 users who suffer from this issue, it is bittersweet news because current Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge owners will have to wait for an over the air update to solve this problem. There are no reports or official confirmations of when such an update may roll out to users. While it is positive that Samsung seems to recognize the problem, it also seems unacceptable for a phone with such high-end specifications to suffer from such a trivial issue like multitasking. With memory management as aggressive as this, it makes you wonder, how much did Samsung actually improve the fluidity of TouchWiz? Is it indeed that much lighter on system resources at all?