Google says it’s okay for Android TV devices to suck

TV streaming devices don’t need to be powerhouses. But they can’t really be pushovers either, especially when we’re talking about smoothly playing 4K video, and especially with how heavy and bloated streaming apps are getting. Which is why Google’s latest change to the Android TV platform is a bit baffling. In a strange move, it actually lowered the RAM requirement for Android TV, from 1.5GB down to just 1GB of memory.

Android Authority is basing that assertion on recent commitments to the Android Open Source Project. Virtualized builds for Android TV can now have as little as 1GB of RAM, though you need 2GB if you want the full-fat Google TV experience (which is a separate UI with some extra features running on top of Android TV). To set your expectations, the newest version of the Google TV streamer has 4GB, and the very old Nvidia Shield TV has 2GB. The upgraded SHIELD TV Pro has 3GB.

I suspect that this move is trying to motivate more manufacturers to release Android TV and Google TV products, enticing them with lower and cheaper hardware requirements. Walmart’s store brand Onn streamer with Android TV, for example, is just $20, and a 4K upgrade version is $50. But even these super-affordable devices have 2GB and 3GB of RAM, respectively. So I can’t imagine a company trying to run modern Android apps focused on smooth video on just one gig of RAM. My Nvidia Shield (again, a very old one, but running fresh software) tends to chug on apps like Max and Paramount+.

There’s another angle: smart TVs. Plenty of televisions cut out the middle man of a streaming box and just load up the internal electronics of a TV with an existing smart TV platform, like Roku, Amazon Fire, or indeed, Android TV. Cutting down the hardware required to run Android TV might be a play to spread the platform, and its lucrative access to apps on the Play Store, to far cheaper television sales.

And since a lot of budget TV buyers essentially expect that integrated software to be crap (they’re buying it to plug in a game console or stick in a retail space), not many customers would actually notice that the software they’re ignoring is starving for memory. Too bad for the people who buy it at a low price and actually want to use those smart TV features, I guess.

This would bother me a lot less if it wasn’t for those aforementioned TV streaming apps getting bigger, slower, and more unwieldy. This seems like a time for Google to be upping its standards, not lowering them, especially since the mobile memory that goes into these streaming boxes isn’t exactly a high-priced component. In the words of a legendary ham, “DISAPPOINTED!.”