Android apps that use too much memory lose Play Store visibility from 2027

Anyone who has lived with a 4GB Android phone knows the pain when you leave WhatsApp, open the camera, come back, and WhatsApp reloads from scratch. That is the system killing background apps because something else on the phone ate the RAM.

Google is finally doing something about it.

From February 2027, apps and games that use too much memory, or that ship code nobody bothered to shrink, can lose visibility and publishing rights on Google Play. Raghavendra Hareesh Pottamsetty, GM of Google Play Developer and Monetization, announced it on the Android Developers Blog on 26 August 2026.

What gets measured

Three things.

1. Dynamic memory, which Google records as anonymous RSS plus swap. In plain terms, memory an app allocates for itself: the Java and Kotlin heap, native allocations, plus whatever the system has squeezed into zRAM. Files sitting in storage do not count.
2. Bitmap memory, meaning the images an app is holding. An app cannot draw an image while its screen is not visible, so keeping those images in RAM in the background is waste.
3. DEX code optimisation, meaning how much of an app’s compiled code has been through a shrinker. From February 2027 an upload needs at least 25% coverage each for optimisation, shrinking and obfuscation. That only applies once the DEX is over 10MB, or 50MB for a game. R8 will do it, and so will any other shrinker.

Play Store scores the first two at the 90th percentile of what real devices report over a rolling 28 days, on phones and tablets running Android 13 or newer. One ugly session will not sink an app.

The ceilings scale with the phone. On a 4GB device an app has to stay under 2GB in the foreground and 1GB once it drops to the background. On a 16GB flagship the foreground ceiling is 4.25GB. Games get more room at every tier.

Phones with less than 3,200MB of total memory are not measured at all.

Why now

Google blames “industry-wide hardware supply constraints”, which is the polite name for the DRAM shortage. We wrote in March about how brands are hiding it, cutting phones from 8GB back to 4GB instead of putting the price up. If you are shopping under KES 30,000, you are getting less RAM this year than you did last year. Google cannot fix the chip market, so it is squeezing the apps instead.

Android is already doing its half of the work. Blair Harmon, Director of Product Management for Android Platform, wrote on 19 August 2026 that Android 17 enforces per-app memory limits, starting on Pixel and spreading to other manufacturers across 4GB to 16GB+ devices. Reach the limit and your pages get forced into zRAM, which costs CPU time to compress and shows up as jank. Keep growing past that and the system kills the app.

The second rule

From April 2027, any app with a sign-in has to recognise you on a new phone and sign you in with no taps, using the Restore Credentials API. Games are exempt for now. Uber ran a five-week trial and manual logins fell 3.4%.

February is five months out, and Play Store scores after 28 days. So, the numbers that decide an app’s rank will be tested from January.