memhogs for Android

The Android companion to memhogs: open it and see which apps are using your phone's memory, largest first, with every helper process rolled up into the app that owns it. Chrome's sandboxed renderers count toward Chrome, not toward twelve rows of sandboxed_process noise.

Why it needs Shizuku

Android does not let a normal app see other apps' memory. That is why every "RAM monitor" on the Play Store shows one total and nothing else. memhogs reads per-app memory the same way a USB debugger would, through Shizuku, which grants shell-level access without root:

1. Install Shizuku from the Play Store, or from its GitHub releases page if the Play Store reports it as incompatible with your device. That happens on very new Android versions before the listing catches up; the APK itself installs and works fine.
2. In Shizuku, start the service. On Android 11+ this takes one tap via wireless debugging; it survives until the next reboot.
3. Open memhogs and grant it access when prompted.

Without Shizuku, memhogs still shows the device-wide used/total bar from public APIs, and explains how to unlock the rest.

What the numbers mean

Memory is PSS (proportional set size), read from dumpsys meminfo. A page shared by N processes counts 1/N toward each, so summing all apps never counts the same physical memory twice. This is the same fair-share metric the memhogs CLI uses on Linux, and the same one Android itself uses to decide which app to kill under pressure.

• Amber numbers are memory, cyan names are installed apps, green names are system daemons that do not resolve to an installed package.
• An app using 15% or more of RAM gets its share flagged in red.
• Tap a row to expand its member processes with their PIDs.
• The filter field narrows the list by name, and the live toggle refreshes every five seconds, like the CLI's --watch.

Reclaiming memory

Expanding an app offers a reclaim button. It runs am kill through the Shizuku shell, which kills the app's background processes only: the same reclaim Android itself performs under memory pressure, so nothing in the foreground and no active service is touched. memhogs re-measures afterward and reports exactly how much came back. Apps the system considers busy may return "nothing to reclaim right now", which is the safety working as intended. System daemons never offer the button.

Install

Grab the APK from the releases page and sideload it. The memhogs website has a step-by-step walkthrough including the Shizuku setup. Store listings (F-Droid, Play) may come later; the releases page is the canonical source either way, and the repo carries ready-to-submit F-Droid metadata in fdroid/ for when that day comes.

Requires Android 8.0 or newer. The full experience requires the Shizuku service to be running.

Building

./gradlew assembleDebug   # APK in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/
./gradlew test            # unit tests

Needs JDK 17 or newer. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full check CI runs and the code standards, and ARCHITECTURE.md for how the pieces fit.

Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with the Shizuku API as the only non-AndroidX dependency.

License

MIT

What's new

• Reclaim several apps at once. Long-press an app to start selecting, tap others, then reclaim them together. Each app still only has its background processes killed. (#2)
• Force stop. Open an app's row and tap force stop to close it completely, even if it's open or running a service. A confirmation spells out what that turns off. Persistent system apps like System UI don't offer it. (#3)
• Brazilian Portuguese. The app follows your system language, or the per-app language setting. (#2)
• No more endless loader. If Shizuku never starts the memhogs shell, you now get an error with a retry after 10 seconds instead of the Pac-Man spinning forever. This is what HyperOS 3 users were hitting. (#1)

HyperOS 3 users

This release doesn't make memhogs work on HyperOS 3 yet. It shows what's going wrong. If you see error: shizuku did not start the shell, please report the exact text and whether restarting Shizuku helps on #1.

Install

Download memhogs-0.2.0.apk below. It installs over 0.1.0 without uninstalling. Requires Android 8.0+ and Shizuku.

Verified on a Pixel 8 (Android 17) and the Android 15 emulator.