16KB page sizes return with the Android 17 beta, but what does it mean?

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16KB page sizes return with the Android 17 beta, but what does it mean?

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The Android Authority team has been diving into the new Android 17 QPR1 Beta and stumbled across an interesting toggle hidden in the developer settings menu on our Pixel 9 Pro XL — “boot with 16KB page size.” Computer aficionados may be familiar with the concept of page size; it’s all about how apps interact with your phone’s RAM. Specifically, this setting changes the smallest possible memory allocation from the long-running 4KB default up to 16KB — a seemingly significant 4× increase.

Android’s support for different page sizes isn’t actually new. This developer-level toggle was actually introduced back with the Android 15 QPR1 beta for the Pixel 8, but it seems to have gone in and out of fashion in recent betas. Still, we’ve spotted the feature reappear on some Pixels in the recent Android 17 beta, so it’s worth revisiting its importance.

Source: 16KB page sizes return with the Android 17 beta, but what does it mean?