[Q] Does ro.config.low_ram=true have an effect on <4.4 ROMs?

As most of you following the KitKat developing scene for lower end devices probably know, Android 4.4 introduced the low_ram property. On 4.4 ROM's, transparent statusbar is disabled for example for devices with this property set to true.

Now, the situation is:

I'm running CM10 (4.1), because it's one of the most stable custom ROM's for my device. A few days ago I put the following line to build.prop:


hoping to notice better optimized RAM management. It's hard to claim an effect knowing that it could very well be placebo, so I was hoping someone understanding this better could explain the effects to me.

Added a new ActivityManager.isLowRamDevice() to allow applications to detect when running on low memory devices and choose to disable large-RAM features.
(...)
We are introducing a new API called ActivityManager.isLowRamDevice() for applications to determine if they should turn off specific memory-intensive features that work poorly on low-memory devices.
For 512MB devices, this API is expected to return: "true" It can be enabled by the following system property in the device makefile. PRODUCT_PROPERTY_OVERRIDES += ro.config.low_ram=true

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http://source.android.com/devices/low-ram.html

I too noted that it says API, so that means that it's dependent on the OS version. Is there any way it can have an effect on memory mangement if not runnign 4.4?

Same goes for disabling JIT(see a bit lower on the source page), which needs to be set in the 'product makefile'

I asked it in a Reddit thread too and someone said it won't work, but I don't think that guy has more knowledge about it than you or me. However, since they say it's an API, and API's are bound to the Android version I don't have much hope for this to work...

For the time I've tried it, I didn't notice any difference anyway, if there is, tweaks like zRam will benefit you much more anyway.