Preparing Your App for Android's Broader Memory Limits

Android 17 introduced per-app memory limits, starting with Pixel devices. Over the coming year an increasing number of manufacturers will adopt them, across devices with 4GB to 16GB of RAM and above.

Three tools report on where an app's memory is going. The ProfilingManager API, introduced in Android 15, requests and collects memory debug artifacts programmatically — Java heap dumps and heap profiles among them — directly from production devices, rather than from a device you are holding. Crashlytics version 20.1.0 adds debug data covering out-of-memory exceptions and memory limiter kills, so a kill attributable to the new limits is distinguishable from an ordinary crash. Android vitals, in the Google Play Console, carries Memory Usage and Bitmap Memory Usage among its metrics.