The Android low memory killer (LMK) daemon monitors the memory state of a running Android system and reacts to high memory pressure by terminating the least essential processes. Android vitals tracks and reports user-perceived LMK terminations in Google Play Console to help you identify memory pressure issues affecting your users.
LMK metric on Android vitals
Android vitals can help you monitor and improve your app's LMK rate. Android vitals measures only one LMK rate: User-perceived LMK rate.
The metric reflects the percentage of your daily active users who experienced at least one user-perceived LMK. A user-perceived LMK is an LMK that is likely to have been noticed by the user. For example, this includes LMKs that happen while your app is displaying an activity or running as a foreground service. These terminations result in an immediate, non-graceful process exit. To the end user, it looks like the app crashed, often bypassing standard lifecycle state-saving mechanisms and resulting in lost user progress.
Android Vitals focuses on these process terminations because they serve as a high-fidelity proxy for memory mismanagement issues. An LMK rate above 1% indicates a critical need for immediate action. However, a lower LMK rate doesn't necessarily mean the app's memory usage is healthy. That lower rate might mean that the LMK daemon is frequently killing processes while they are in the background, which degrades "warm start" performance and multitasking fluidity.
You can find the metric under the Stability section in Android vitals:
As with similar core vital metrics, such as ANRs and crashes, you can filter the metrics, compare your metrics with your peers, or monitor the metric's change for a long period of time (up to 3 years). Data is available for existing apps starting from 28 Jan 2025.
