Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge Memory Problem News: Fix Being Worked On

Although the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are being widely cited for their improvements on Samsung's previous flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, an old flaw in Android Lollipop was found recently in the latest Samsung devices.

The flaw was noticed as soon as units of the two devices started shipping to customers. Samsung has now formally acknowledged that the phones are slowing down and apps are crashing as memory allocated to apps is not released.

The memory problem affects the RAM in the devices. Describing the problem, Samsung termed it as "memory mismanagement." The company explained that as apps close, the memory consumed by them is not released. Instead as the memory is kept occupied and other apps open, the RAM is quickly overwhelmed resulting in the devices slowing down. In some cases as the demand on memory increases, some apps suddenly shut down.

Users can resort to a temporary fix to deal with this problem. They can navigate to the card menu and then close all active apps by ticking the "Close All" option.

Forbes said this problem was missed by those who reviewed the S6 and S6 Edge as they usually checked performance after a fresh boot which shuts down active apps.

Samsung is working on a permanent fix to the problem. It could come in the 5.1.1 Lollipop update which will be launched soon for the S6 and the S6 Edge. This update has already been rolled out to selective users who affirmed that it has a fix for the memory management problem. This could mean that the latest flagship smartphones from Samsung could skip Lollipop 5.1 altogether and immediately take the 5.1.1 Lollipop update instead.

There are also indications that Samsung is pushing out micro updates to users on the S6 and S6 Edge to attempt to fix the memory problem. Users have been asked to check the software update section in settings for more information.