GrapheneOS's hardened memory allocator is why Osmand crawls on your Pixel
GrapheneOS – When an app is slow
After a year on GrapheneOS, one app—Osmand—ran noticeably slower than on other Android devices. The culprit: the hardened memory allocator, which adds significant overhead for map scrolling. The fix is simple: long-press the app icon, open Info, go to Exploit protection, and disable only the hardened memory allocator for that app. Osmand speeds back up, with a small security trade-off the author accepts.
The reason behind it is the hardened memory allocator, which seems to create a significant overhead for Osmand. That might be because scrolling a map requires constant loading and discarding of data.
- negative_zero
Odd. Google Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS here. OsmAnd works perfectly fine for me without disabling any exploit protection options.
- Groxx
Huh. Yeah, it is noticeably faster on my 9a with that disabled. I wonder what they're doing differently...
- aucisson_masque
What is the point of this hardening feature if you got to disable it ?
You can tweak Android as much as you want, the OS was not made to be private nor secure. App developers will never check if it breaks the grapheneos memory allocating feature (amongst others) so by default you disable it.
Anyway it also requires the app to be able to even run on a rom that doesn’t respect play integrity.
- hadi77ir
I wonder if a website using leaflet.js has better or worse performance in the said case. If it does better, then maybe the problem is on OsmAnd's side?
- pjmlp
Maybe the actual solution is to improve, replace the application.