App review: Memory Doctor for iOS
Memory Doctor is probably one of the less complicated apps ever (it has one screen, one button) but it can also be one of the most useful ones. It simply shows you how your RAM is being used, and gives you a button to fix it. Simple, yet so very useful.
Apple likes to pretend that you don’t have to worry about multitasking in iOS since the device will make sure you always have enough. Here int he real world however, that’s not the case, and there are way too many apps who use up insane amounts of memory for no reason even when they’re not running other than in “fast app switching mode”. This can be a big problem since it will cripple the OS and make everything laggy, not just RAM heavy apps but even simple things like the keyboard. We Rule, a game I play, falls into both the category of leaking memory as well as being very unstable and close to impossible to run if there is already memory leakage going on.
The solution to this is Memory Doctor. It’s a very simple app that shows you how your RAM is being used at the moment, as well as give you a “refresh” button which simply kills everything that isn’t needed in the background to free up memory (basically the same as closing all apps by double tapping the home button, but a more advanced, one button solution). This results in better performance as well as better battery.
There really isn’t anything else to say about this app other than that it works well. Running it before starting any RAM intensive games (or after having used an app that is known to leak memory) really improves the performance all around, and makes sure that bad third party programming doesn’t ruin the vanilla iPad experience. Memory leakage can occur in any OS (ehem Firefox ehem), and since it’s a bug it needs to be addressed no matter how much RAM you have. Memory Doctor is an iPhone app (that will of course work on the iPad, just not with the native resolution) that you can get for $0.99 in the iTunes store. Well worth the money in my opinion!
