Memory Leak Bug Spotted In Android 5.1 Nexus 5
Google released the Android 5.1 factory images for the Nexus 5 last week, but a new report reveals a critical memory leak vulnerability in this last Lollipop update.
Android 5.1 was designed to fix a number of bugs and vulnerabilities while introducing several new features to Google’s mobile OS. Devices running Android 5.1 can now support dual SIM cards, meaning you can use your device with two separate phone numbers. According to the cybersecurity experts at ThreatPost, however, the update also contains a bug which drains significant amounts of memory.
This technically isn’t a new bug, as it first appeared back in the Android 5.0.1 update. But many users expected Google to fix it with this most recent update. Well, it appears that Android 5.1 did not fix the memory leak bug affecting Nexus 5 users. Dozens of users have reporting seeing their random access memory (RAM) usage jumping to over 1GB. It’s important to note that the Nexus 5 only has 2GB RAM available, some of which is reserved for the actual Android OS, so this is obviously a serious problem.
“The most prevalent issue users have witnessed has been a massive surge in memory usage. On an issue tracker for the for the bug on Android’s Open Source Project (AOSP) late last week some users reported seeing their RAM bloat to over 1 gigabyte and leave as little as 150 megabytes free, before their phones ultimately crashed,” wrote Chris Brook of ThreatPost. “Users claim they’ve seen their phone’s system memory swell, usually after opening a game, then dismissing it. Even if apps are closed however, the phone will go on to gobble up memory until there’s no more space and the device stops responding.“
There are a few things you can do to solve the Android memory leak. If you notice your Nexus 5 running unusually slow, open your apps and force stop any that you aren’t using at the moment. It’s believed that certain apps drain memory while running in the background, so killing them should free up some RAM. Furthermore, you can perform a hard reboot of your Nexus 5 to flush clean the RAM.
Hopefully, reports of the memory leak bug will coerce Google into releasing a new update. In the meantime, though, you should try one of the solutions mentioned above to solve this problem.
Have you encountered this bug? Let us know in the comments section below!
