Why is it that sometimes, closing an application on a phone decreases available RAM instead of increasing it?

Question

Why is it that sometimes, closing an application on a phone decreases available RAM instead of increasing it?

In: 2

Answer 1

Closing an app makes the OS work some to save the app data and settings, that work can take up a bit of RAM. So leaving an app asleep in the background may be better then making the OS go through the process of saving info to flash.

And also there is some inaccuracy and guess-estimates going on to show how much RAM is in use, since it actually changing in sub-second ticks. And the task manager app using some RAM too, so the act of watching the system uses RAM.