Google will start policing how much memory Android apps use, and it says the reason is the global shortage of RAM. From February 2027, an app that exceeds the new limits risks two penalties. Android can slow it down or shut it. The Play Store can bury it.
The company published the requirements this week on its Android Developers Blog. TechCrunch spotted them first. Google says the mobile industry faces “significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability”.
Its technical documentation puts it more bluntly. “An ecosystem-wide memory crisis is imminent due to rising RAM costs,” the company wrote, in a line first noted by The Register.
What the limits actually are
The thresholds scale with the device. On a phone with 8GB of RAM, an app can use no more than 2.25GB in the foreground. It gets 1.5GB for user-perceived services and 1.5GB in the background. Devices with more than 16GB are mostly exempt.
