At the time android didn’t have multi-tasking
Android always had multitasking. Part of the issue with android 1 and 2 was that it didnt have any way to properly manage the task managers which lead to people installing task killers(which had utility in those days) and auto task killers(which due to how android handles caching just lead to a cycle of killing, thing popping up, killing, and etc). My g1 with a swap partition was probably my best android phone at keeping things in memory without auto killing it until I got a phone with 6gigs of ram.
Just spitballing I dont know for sure, but wouldnt the flexibility make them less brittle and less prone to shattering?