Google Play sets hard memory limits for Android apps

Google has set hard memory thresholds Android apps distributed through Google Play will need to meet starting February 2027, an expansion of a memory-efficiency push it first announced in June. The company says rising RAM prices and consumers buying phones with leaner specs make an "ecosystem-wide memory crisis" a real risk, and it wants to stop one poorly optimized app from destabilizing an entire device.

The actual numbers scale with the device's physical RAM. On an 8GB device, an app can use no more than 2.25GB in the foreground, 1.5GB for user-perceived background services, and 1.5GB in the background overall. Bitmap memory is capped at 200MB for user-perceived and background use, and 400MB cached, across all device tiers, with separate limits for games. Devices with more than 16GB of RAM are mostly exempt. Google is also requiring DEX (Dalvik Executable) code optimization, aimed at faster launches and steadier runtime memory use.

A second requirement lands in April 2027: apps will need to support zero-tap credential restoration during device migration, using Android's Restore Credentials API. Google's reasoning is that manual sign-in flows during setup are both bad for retention and a real phishing and credential-theft exposure while a device is being migrated.

For an app already running lean, none of this changes much. For anything with an unaddressed memory leak or heavy bitmap caching, the ceiling is now a hard, dated requirement rather than a performance suggestion. Worth profiling actual foreground and background memory usage against these specific numbers well before February, rather than finding out from a Play Console warning after the thresholds are already live.