title: Very high memory consumption on Nexus 7 with Android Jelly Bean
body: <p>I have an application which is quite memory consuming - handling large bitmaps. I have tuned the application using well known techniques for handling such bitmaps (please no links on tutorials in answers...) so that it runs fine without any <code>OutOfMemoryError</code> exceptions, but only on devices running HC and ICS, on Jelly Bean the same application has almost 80 % higher memory consumption, which leads to bad user experience, the app is lagging and slow.</p>
  
  <p>I prepared a simple test, just created the simplest Android application using a template in Eclipse; the app has only one activity with a background bitmap (1280 x 800). On device with Android 3.1 (Asus A500) it allocates:</p>
  
  <pre><code>01-23 12:28:02.402: D/dalvikvm(31706): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 65K, 4% free 6559K/6787K, paused 17ms
  01-23 12:28:02.402: I/dalvikvm-heap(31706): Grow heap (frag case) to 10.355MB for 4096016-byte allocation
  01-23 12:28:02.432: D/dalvikvm(31706): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1K, 3% free 10558K/10823K, paused 1ms+2ms
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On Nexus 7 with JellyBean 4.2.1 it allocates:</p>
  
  <pre><code>01-23 12:13:49.740: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 84K, 4% free 7464K/7700K, paused 18ms, total 18ms
  01-23 12:13:49.750: I/dalvikvm-heap(23815): Grow heap (frag case) to 11.338MB for 4096016-byte allocation
  01-23 12:13:49.770: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 1K, 3% free 11463K/11704K, paused 23ms, total 23ms
  01-23 12:13:49.800: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_CONCURRENT freed &lt;1K, 3% free 11463K/11704K, paused 2ms+2ms, total 23ms
  01-23 12:13:49.900: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed &lt;1K, 3% free 11463K/11704K, paused 12ms, total 13ms
  01-23 12:13:49.920: I/dalvikvm-heap(23815): Grow heap (frag case) to 18.259MB for 7259056-byte allocation
  01-23 12:13:49.940: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 0K, 2% free 18552K/18796K, paused 16ms, total 16ms
  01-23 12:13:49.960: D/dalvikvm(23815): GC_CONCURRENT freed &lt;1K, 2% free 18552K/18796K, paused 3ms+2ms, total 17ms
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>So I have two questions:</strong></p>
  
  <p>1, why the application consumes so much memory when using only one bitmap on the background of its main activity?</p>
  
  <p>2, why the device with JellyBean has almost 80 % higher memory consumption when running the same application?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT1:</strong></p>
  
  <p>All devices have the same screen resolution: 1280 x 800 px</p>