Devs to Reduce Memory Usage for Low-End Windows Phones

In February, Microsoft unveiled a new flavor of its Windows Phone operating system, one destined for lower-end devices, such as the highly affordable Nokia Lumia 610. 

The company had to make a series of modifications to the platform, to ensure that users would receive a consistent experience from the OS even on these devices, and it has already provided a series of details on the matter. 

Application developers are also urged to apply new principles when designing their applications, so as to make sure that owners of these under spec’d devices can enjoy their software. 

One of these requirements involves a reduced memory usage for their apps, just as previously mentioned. To be more precise, Microsoft is suggesting that apps should not eat more than 90MB of memory when loaded on handsets with only 256MB of memory. 

Basically, this means that all apps that need more than that should be redesigned to eat less memory. Those who already have lower requirements do not need urgent modifications in this area. 

In a recent post on Microsoft’s blog, Mike Battista provides a series of details on what developers should do when it comes to targeting lower devices with their software. 

For example, developers can take advantage of memory profiler and memory-related API's to learn more on the areas in which they could improve the memory usage of their applications. 

“These tools can help you understand pretty quickly what the peak memory usage of your app is as well as what the breakdown of memory usage is across various states of your app,” Battista explains. 

“A general principle to keep in mind is that loading less will result in less memory usage. Loading less could mean loading less data at a time, loading less/smaller content, or fixing leaks which result in more objects residing in memory over the lifetime of your app.”

When it comes to optimizing applications for 256MB devices, modifications brought to memory usage are of great importance. Devs can learn more on the matter via said blog post, which also links to additional documentation on the matter.

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