2013's mobile devices come with 1-2GB RAM, yet Android still enforces a very small heap size of 24MB-64MB only (though it keeps increasing with time).
It's pretty easy to write an Android app that drains the heap. For example: Caching images w/o an LRU cache, reading whole files into memory instead of working with streams.
-- Your code will always use up as much memory as the system has (My spin on Parkinson's law).
I'm developing an Android app with a big UT suite that I run on Eclipse in the PC. I noticed that my default heap size is 256MB, huge compared to mobile, meaning my tests could pass on the PC, but still cause an OOME on an actual device.
So, I created MobileLikeSmallHeapDuringTestsEnforce, a new unit test to enforce a small heap size during Junit tests execution. Just make sure you throw it in to any test project you have and you're safe.
Created as a GitHubGist, you're welcome to make it better:
