Google will limit how much memory Android apps can use from February 2027

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.

Google measures the main figure as Anonymous Resident Set Size plus Swap. That is the memory an app holds which no file backs. Bitmap memory has its own cap, and it applies to every device. Apps get 200MB in user-perceived services and in the background, and 400MB cached. The limits differ somewhat for games.

Those numbers are not generous on a mid-range handset. A modern app with a large image cache and an embedded browser can approach them without doing anything unusual.

The third requirement covers DEX code optimisation. DEX files hold a compressed version of an app’s Java bytecode, and Google wants them optimised for modest memory use, faster launches and better runtime performance.

The penalty is distribution

Google is explicit about what happens to an app that ignores this. “If your app exceeds these limits, it will be slowed down and may be terminated,” the documentation says.

The commercial threat is the larger one. “Apps and games that do not meet these thresholds may see reduced app visibility and publishing capabilities on Google Play,” Google wrote. It promised more detail later this year.

Reduced visibility on the Play Store is the sanction that matters to a developer. An app that ranks lower in search results loses installs, and installs are revenue. Google has not yet said how far it will go.

Where the shortage came from

The AI data centre boom is consuming the memory that phones need. TNW reported in May that AI is killing the cheap smartphone, because the memory that used to go into handsets now goes into data centres. Nvidia AI server prices are rising more than 15% from early next year on memory costs.

Consumers are already paying. Amazon raised prices on Echo, Kindle and Fire TV devices by up to 60% overnight in August. Xiaomi’s profit fell again as the crunch squeezed its phone margins.

Phone makers have responded by fitting less RAM. The Verge noted that the base Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL ship with less memory than last year’s models. Google confirmed higher Pixel 11 prices in July as RAM costs surged, and said then that it was reworking Android to use less memory. This is that rework, arriving as a rule for everyone else.

It starts with Pixel and spreads

The per-app memory limits arrived with Android 17, on Pixel phones first. Google says the rest of the industry is coming.

“Over the coming year, an increasing number of manufacturers will leverage the Android per-app memory limits across their portfolio of device RAM configurations from 4GB to 16GB+ devices,” the company wrote.

This expands a push Google announced in June. That one aimed at “preventing one bad actor from destroying the multitasking experience and stability of the user’s entire device”. Its documentation gives the example that worries it. A single app springs a memory leak, eats most of the phone, and forces Android to kill everything else.

The squeeze lands hardest on cheap phones

Google’s own wording covers devices from 4GB to 16GB and above. The apps that will struggle sit at the bottom of that range. Those phones sell in Europe, India, Brazil and Africa rather than in Silicon Valley.

Google frames the rules as protection for exactly those users. A phone with 4GB has no headroom, so one badly behaved app ruins the whole device. The counter-argument is simple. Developers now carry the cost of a shortage that data centre buyers created.

On-device AI is part of the problem

Google is also pushing developers to run AI models on the phone itself, through Gemini Nano. Those models sit in the same memory the new rules ration. The Register noted the tension in one line: on-device AI probably is not helping.

Google has not addressed that directly. It is rolling out tools that warn developers when an app crosses a threshold. Deeper diagnostics arrive later in the year, including a Memory Limiter feature that stops an app taking too much of the device.

A second deadline in April

Google is not only rationing memory. It is also changing what an app must do when a user buys a new phone.

The memory rules are the first of two stages. In April 2027, every Play Store app that offers sign-in must support zero-tap credential restoration when a user moves to a new device.

Google frames that as security rather than convenience. Manual sign-ins during setup do not just create friction, it says, they expose apps to phishing and credential theft. Google points developers at the Android Restore Credentials API.

Two dates now matter. Memory and code thresholds bite in February 2027, and the sign-in requirement follows in April. What Google has not published is how much store visibility an app forfeits for missing either one.