Glyn Williams answering on Quora:

you need four or eight times more memory, than you are actually using to be super efficient. But when the memory becomes constrained, that performance goes way down. This is why Android devices have all that RAM. iOS does not use this style of garbage collection and does not slow down in constrained memory environments. So 1GB for iOS results in more performance than 3GB for Android.

I knew that garbage collection was the reason for Android’s insatiable appetite for RAM, but I didn’t realize it was this bad. I suppose this is just another example of why you shouldn’t get too hung up on hardware specs, as they don’t tell the whole story.

(Via Cult of Mac.)