Android Wear 2.0 Memory Leak

Question

I created a blank Android Wear 2.0 stand-alone app project in Android Studio. I noticed that when I run the blank app on my watch there seems to be a memory leak (shown below). Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

The device I'm testing it on is an LG Watch Style, running Android Wear 2.0

This is a blank project, here is the code:

MainActivity.java

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.wearable.activity.WearableActivity;

public class MainActivity extends WearableActivity {


    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
    }

}

AndroidManifest.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
          package="com.mc.memorytester">

    <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.type.watch"/>

    <application
        android:allowBackup="true"
        android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name"
        android:supportsRtl="true"
        android:theme="@android:style/Theme.DeviceDefault">
        <uses-library
            android:name="com.google.android.wearable"
            android:required="false"/>

        <activity
            android:name=".MainActivity"
            android:label="@string/app_name"
            android:theme="@android:style/Theme.DeviceDefault.Light">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>

                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>
    </application>

</manifest>

build.gradle

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 25
    buildToolsVersion "26.0.0"
    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.mc.memorytester"
        minSdkVersion 25
        targetSdkVersion 25
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    compile 'com.google.android.support:wearable:2.0.3'
    compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-wearable:11.0.4'
    provided 'com.google.android.wearable:wearable:2.0.3'
}

Answer 1

This doesn't look like a memory leak. If you were in fact leaking, the total amount of used memory would keep increasing over time, and eventually cause a very sluggish experience and/or an OutOfMemoryException. What you see here are cycles of objects being created, and then garbage collected.

There are still things you can do to improve this, since frequent garbage collection might result in hiccups/lag.

My suggestion is to take a look at methods that are executed often (onDraw() and similar things) and make sure that you're not creating objects inside of them. If that doesn't help you can use the Android Profiler to dig deeper and find out what's being created (details about how you do that can be found e.g. here)