Android 5.0 Lollipop
Android 5.0 Lollipop bootanimation creating memory leak. Google Play Store

The bootanimation in Android 5.0 Lollipop seems to create serious memory leak, resulting in core system services and other processes getting killed during boot.

"I've been recently playing around with different bootanimation.zip to customise boot animations on my Galaxy S4 with Lollipop, and noticed that /system/bin/bootanimation causes serious memory leaks.

I thought this issue was due to poor bootanimation.zip, or the custom ROM I've installed, but after testing this with pure AOSP installed Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, the issue was reproducible," confirmed a user's post on Android Open Source Project issue tracker.

According to recognised XDA developer, Arter97 the current bootanimation implementation (Android 5.0) does not release the resources held to play previous frames.

The developer confirms that he reproduced this bug on a number of Android devices such as Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy S4, Nexus 7, Nexus 5, Nexus 4 and even more with CyanogenMod 12, Google's stock AOSP and LG's Lollipop firmware.

"I'm almost certain that other Android 5.0 Lollipop ROMs may have the same problem (except for Samsung's Touchwiz - Touchwiz uses qmg format and I was unable to reproduce this bug on Touchwiz)," states the developer.

Samsung's TouchWiz is the only ROM which has fixed this issue.

Fix for bootanimation memory leak

The developer has shared a "working and permanent fix" for the bootanimation issue. He has released a bootanimation zip file (download link below) containing three binaries: CM12/bootanimation for CyanogenMod 12 users, AOSP/CPU architecture/ bootanimation for pure or stock AOSP users and manufacturer's ROM users and Nexus users with stock ROM installed.

Install the correct bootanimation binary based on your device's CPU architecture.

How to install

Download the bootanimation.zip, extract the right bootanimation binary and place it under /system/bin----- replace the older one (one /system/bin/booatanimation).

  • Correct owner- root:root
  • Correct permission- 755 (rwxr-xr-x)

[Source: XDA]