 <p>Try <a href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/track-memory-allocations.html" rel="nofollow">tracking memory allocations</a> while application is in use. </p> <p>Also, holding references to Bitmap Drawables can <a href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/01/avoiding-memory-leaks.html" rel="nofollow">produce memory leaks</a>. When a Drawable is added to View, a circular reference is created. So when you hold a reference to Bitmap drawable, it further holds a reference to a View and this View can never be GCed. </p> <p>The easiest way to avoid it is to extract a bitmap from a Bitmap Drawable and hold a reference to it, then when Activity is restarted/reloaded, you create new Bitmap Drawables from this bitmaps. This is how a Photostream example works (described at the end): <a href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/faster-screen-orientation-change.html" rel="nofollow">Faster screen orientation change</a></p>