Leak Canary: What Is It?
Article Summary
Memory leaks are silent killers of Android app performance. They're hard to spot manually, but there's a tool that does the heavy lifting for you.
LeakCanary is a lightweight debugging library from Square that automatically detects memory leaks during development. Android developer Erman Derici breaks down how this single dependency can catch performance issues before they reach production.
Key Takeaways
- Setup takes one line: just add the debugImplementation dependency
- Automatically detects leaks in Activities, Fragments, Services, and ViewModels
- Provides detailed heap dumps when leaks reach a threshold
- Sends notifications with actionable logs during runtime testing
Critical Insight
LeakCanary locates memory leaks automatically during development, but you still need to fix them yourself.
