Early adopters of Google's Android Lollipop may have had a tough time with the memory leak issue, but Google has finally ironed it out with an internal fix which could likely come with the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop software update.
The issue was originally found on the Android 5.0.1 Lollipop software. Nexus device users who had updated to Android 5.1 Lollipop were also battling the memory leak bug.
This bug affects the overall performance of the device, and gadgets that had the software installed would experience launching issues, applications crashing suddenly, and a drop in performance.
Some apps - especially Google+ - would restart by itself, active apps would vanish during use and free RAM would suddenly drop from 1.1GB/1.3GB to 700MB/800MB in a few hours. While opening apps increased the RAM used, closing the apps did not decrease the same.
"After one day of usage the free ram down to 800 mb and I can see google+ restarting... Without reseting the phone, it returns automaticaly to 1.1 gb free ram. All this happen without opening or changing any app, what proves the memory leak," complained a user on the forum.
"So the problem is that every app you open increases system ram, and even you close the apps, the ram don´t decrease. This happens until a point where all the ram is occupied and the system collapse," ranted another user.
Some users even revealed that the memory leak issue was worse in Android 5.1 when compared to Android 5.0.1.
With the problem affecting several users, the issue "Memory leak still present on Android 5.1" was escalated to Google on its Android Open Source Code (AOSP) Issue Tracker forum.
On Friday, March 13, Google closed the issue. Per the Issue Tracker page on AOSP, the "Issue No. 159738" has been sorted by Google and marked as "FutureRelease," indicating that it intends to roll out the fix via an impending software update in the near term. The bug fix will likely be included in Android 5.1.1 Lollipop release.
However, at this juncture, it is not known when the patch from Google will make its way to Android users.
