Is it possible to increase RAM in Smartphones?

Practically speaking, you cannot increase the physical RAM as you would on a PC or a laptop. But there are ways to increase the RAM by making use of virtual RAM. You reserve a part of your microSD card memory as the virtual RAM. The system will use it as it would use the physical RAM. By the way, RAM has no bearing on the number of apps you would install on your phone. The number of apps depends on the storage capacity of the device. RAM is needed to run the operations on your device.

But, please note that your memory card needs to be real fast for this technique to work effectively. Otherwise it will cause your smartphone to hang more than what it was doing before. My personal experience has been not very good with using this technique. I was fed up and reverted back to the physical RAM itself.

If you are interested, here is how you can go with it. Please note that this technique is for Android platform. Also you need to be rooted to be able to use it.

You need to install the RAM expander app on your device for the purpose. There are many apps that are meant for this. One such popular app is ROEHSOFT RAM Expander (SWAP). Before downloading the app,make sure it is compatible with your device. Download MemoryInfo & Swapfile Check for the purpose. Once you are confirmed about the compatibility, download the RAM expander and install.

You can select the amount of memory you would want to allot for SWAP. You may also select Optimal option to automatically set the best possible value. Once everything is set, your system will now have more RAM.

Please note that you need to have a memory card of at least class 10. The app says it is compatible with class 4, but my experience has been not good enough. Also ensure that your SD card has good read/write speed.

It is possible to increase the RAM in smartphones. But there are few issues with that upgrade.

1. It voids your warranty. No official service center and official website allows you to overclock the device. It doesn't support when you try to modify the device after warranty period.

2. Most of the RAM in the device come attached with few other parts, which means removing it not only makes it impossible but damaged other component. Though graphic RAM is part of some processor, not many devices have it and also they are not removable.

3. Not many vendors keep the RAM required for the tablets and smartphones. So you may have to either reach out to wholesalers or import it from online websites such as Alibaba.

One more option is explained in previous answer : Virtual RAM. However Android doesn't perform good under this option considering it has to make a lot of read and write requests on the external card.

There are some of the videos on Youtube that shows how to increase virtual RAM with external SD. For example check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RalE8mbSuaM

There are many other ways to increase the RAM but mostly those options are also device specific (sometimes even model specific). So the wise choice is to avoid overloading the device.