Android Tutorial: Use LeakCanary to detect memory leaks

Overview

The memory leak can be a headache to detect and to resolve, small memory leaks can be hidden and may be seen after a long usage of the application and hunting memory leaks is not a simple task.
In this tutorial we will create a leaked application and we will use the LeakCanary library to detect the memory leak.

Step 1: add the LeakCanary dependency to the application

Modify the app/build.gradle to add the LeakCanary dependency as follows:

Step 2: Extend and configure the Application class

We need to call LeakCanary.install in onCreate method:

Step 3: Create a leaked activity

For this we will create a singleton class that saves the context:

Then, the main activity (leaked one), will use the singleton and then we'll go to a new activity:

Then, in the new activity we'll call System.gc to force the garbage collector in order to accelerate the analysis.

Step 4: Retrieve the analysis result

A nice notification can be shown:

The result can be retrieved from logcat:

Source code

Complete source code of the sample can be found in Github.
Complete documentation of LeakCanary can be found in the following links:
https://corner.squareup.com/2015/05/leak-canary.html
https://github.com/square/leakcanary