About Smart phone performance increase

[jobsp90]

I am confused, in most of the Smartphone's there is an option to clear the recently closed apps. Does this really useful in getting good performance or we have to close the running apps in RAM settings?
Which is better and why?

 

[paperwastage]

Myth

Free unused ram is wasted ram

Let the apps stay in memory.

It was an issue back in the early days when phones only had 512MB ram (if phone was low on ram, it took some time to kill app and reclaim... That's why there was a button for you to clear ram yourself, and people installed memory clearer apps)

On my nexus 5, I don't have a button that clears all apps... Only individual apps (cough Facebook/Snapchat)

 

[JeffMD]

Just got a phone with lolipop, generally you can leave any apps dormant in the background and let the OS hand closing them, but because chrome seems to have done away with tabs and instead opens new windows I find I need to use the close all function as a quick way of closing any random chrome windows I don't know about.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Myth

Free unused ram is wasted ram

Let the apps stay in memory.

It was an issue back in the early days when phones only had 512MB ram (if phone was low on ram, it took some time to kill app and reclaim... That's why there was a button for you to clear ram yourself, and people installed memory clearer apps)

On my nexus 5, I don't have a button that clears all apps... Only individual apps (cough Facebook/Snapchat)

That'd be fine if it wasn't for the fact that doing that causes hangups. Both apps and the overall system performance lags if I don't regularly force close apps. Its on a Note 3. And its not like I'm using power hungry apps or a ton of them. It might be possible that it is a Samsung issue, since I've seen some people say that, but considering most criticisms about Android seem to get deflected as being just a Samsung problem (despite people using Nexus devices even claiming similar issues, like Lollipop's issues), so I'm not sure I buy that. Performance is nowhere close to how people claim it is in my experience. Its why I just roll my eyes now when people say "no Android is fine compared to iOS" and then Google releases a new versions that allegedly improves performance and smoothness even for older devices, with no actual change (and Lollipop actually made things worse). Now maybe iOS has gotten significantly worse as well but in my experience Android still has room to improve.