Memory Usage In Empty Application

I have created an empty application on Android 4.0.3 and when I dump heap with hprof, I see that 8,3 MB are used by the application (on my Nexus S)! It is very big for an empty app

Solution 1:

If you are on ICS (I assume you are), then it's because of hardware acceleration. Not sure if it's enabled by default (I don't think it is), I don't have any ICS :(

Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.

Source: https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s

Edit: To reduce it you'll need to set your build target to honeycomb or lower, but then you can't use hardware acceleration either. Your call.