As the mobile hardware sector battles component supply pressures that are driving up RAM costs and prompting phone manufacturers to cut down onboard memory, Google is rolling out sweeping quality guidelines across the Google Play ecosystem to protect device performance. To prevent software from overwhelming hardware and causing system lag, Google Play is introducing strict performance benchmarks designed to lower app memory footprints, alongside new standards for secure device migration during user upgrades.
Thirdly, Google Play will require published Android App Bundles to achieve at least 25% coverage using code-shrinking, optimisation and obfuscation utilities like R8. To keep the operating system responsive across various hardware tiers, Google Play is establishing clear technical thresholds across three core development areas. First is memory limits. Google will monitor anonymous resident set size (RSS) plus compressed swap data, measuring the private memory used by an application while ignoring code and asset files stored on the device. This consumption will be assessed across active and background states, as well as distinct device capability tiers. Next is bitmap resource management wherein developers must ensure visual assets and bitmaps do not sit idle in system memory during non-visible states, such as when an application is running in the background or held in cache. This optimisation lowers memory overhead, accelerates cold starts, curbs Application Not Responding (ANR) crashes and boosts runtime frame rates.