Google’s Workaround AI-driven Memory Crisis: Reduce Memory Usage

Google wants companies to optimise their apps to use lesser memory on mobile devices. 

The move comes as the mobile industry is facing memory chip shortages caused by the AI data centre surge. 

For the uninitiated, the consumer electronics industry is witnessing the global memory chip industry grappling with an unprecedented DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) shortage.

 The crisis has spread into nearly all memory types, spanning consumer flash chips in USB drives and smartphones to advanced high-bandwidth memory (HBM) powering AI data centers. The cause? Rising demand for HBM and next-generation server memory, leading to manufacturing constraints, record-high prices and supply rationing. Skyrocketing demand from AI infrastructure and consumer electronics is overwhelming global supply.

Last week, Google in a post also acknowledged “industry-wide hardware constraints” and potential impact on the Android ecosystem. 

“The mobile industry is navigating significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability that over time can negatively impact the user experience. Android is addressing this challenge head-on with broader memory limits that aim to protect the overall user experience from apps using excess memory and causing system-wide slowdowns,” Google said in a post. 

“Building on this, today Google Play is establishing performance thresholds to help developers ensure their apps continue to deliver the premium experience users expect. This includes new thresholds across dynamic memory usage, bitmap usage, and code optimization to prevent unexpected on-device performance throttling and app terminations,” it continued.

The move, however, is also going to impact millions of companies, including D2C players, who now have to optimise the apps on the Android ecosystem. 

While not very surprising, the shift is likely not going to be easy. 

Speaking to Entrepreneur India, Yash Varyani, cofounder and CTO of Drizz, a vision AI mobile testing platform, says that the fixing isn’t the hard part. 

“Shrinking images, releasing memory you’re no longer using, cleaning up work that keeps running after the user has moved on, this is well-understood engineering. A good team gets through most of it in a few weeks,” he said.

“The hard part is knowing you have a problem at all. When Android kills an app for using too much memory, it doesn’t leave a stack trace behind. Those are Google’s own words. The user watches the app vanish. The developer sees nothing. The dashboard stays clean.

And Google isn’t measuring your app in a lab. It’s measuring your users’ actual phones, over 28 days. So an app that behaves perfectly on the handsets your team owns can still fail, and you won’t know until the warning arrives,” he continued.

Rightly so, the measurements land in the Play Console in November. 

Enforcement starts in February. Google’s own justification for the change is that you can’t optimize what you can’t measure, which is a fair admission about how this has worked until now.

Bhavesh Korat, cofounder Brands.live, notes that Google’s memory thresholds are being read as an app-quality update and that it’s actually a supply-chain story landing on developers.

“Mobile DRAM is up nearly 70% since early 2025, and memory is now 25-30% of the bill of materials on a sub-USD 200 phone. That cost gets absorbed the only way it can, the entry-level device ships with less RAM. So the tax lands on the INR 8,000 phone, not the Pixel. It lands on the markets that brought the next 500 million users online,” he added.

“For us this is not abstract. We build a design app for Indian MSMEs, and most of our users run 4GB or less. Dynamic memory and bitmap usage, the two thresholds Google named, are the core loop of every canvas we render. The discipline is overdue; India’s ecosystem learned this once in the Lite app era. But let’s be honest about who is paying for the AI build-out, he continued.

Given that the chip crisis is not going to end any sooner, it’s time for new developers/companies to stop treating the budget phone as an edge case and start treating it as the target. 

“If your app runs well on a 4GB device, it runs well on everything above it. Optimisation only travels upward. Most teams work the other way round,  they build on the best phone in the office and fix the cheap ones later, when complaints come in. That’s the habit this deadline punishes. iOS developers have lived with these constraints for years, because Apple controls the hardware and is stricter about memory. Android had cheap RAM in abundance, and everyone got comfortable. That period is over,” Varyani adds.