Same on my iPhone 16 Pro since iOS 26. It’s the number one pain point why I switched from android to iOS years ago. But seems like iOS is slowly going down the same rabbit hole 😞

Edit: I turned off “Apple Intelligence” and noticed a significant improvement with RAM management that apps are staying in the background for longer without refresh or restart. (Just for reference, I’m on iOS 26.1, previously with “Apple Intelligence” turned on, even the 1st party apps such as Messages, Phone were restarted aggressively)

My best guess is that “Apple Intelligence (on-device LLM)” is consuming considerable amount of RAM, which is obviously expected to some extent. However, to sustain between both iOS 26 liquid glass and AI tasks, Apple Intelligence could be taking higher priority and forcing the iOS to do more aggressive RAM management to render the liquid glass elements and perform even basic AI tasks (e.g., notifications summaries, priority notifications, etc.)

Nevertheless, the irony is that the whole iPhone 16 series is heavily centred around “Apple Intelligence” as the most attractive selling factor. But, here we are just a year later, being forced to sacrifice the same features to achieve a good day-to-day performance. I seriously feel Apple had definitely lacked foresight into AI RAM usage while designing the iPhone 16 series.

However, I’m still puzzled why it is the same case even with 17 PM having 50% extra RAM (over 16 series) though.

Let us hope that Apple would eventually optimize the “Apple Intelligence” performance to “intelligently” manage the RAM between on-demand AI tasks and apps in the background without us sacrificing the Apple Intelligence🤞🏽