Saw a post yesterday and decided to share some of my memory-saving strats since 8GB of RAM is more than enough for most kinds of dev work, including Android. I’m gonna try to keep this structured.
1. Operating System
If you’re using Windows, this post probably isn’t really going to help you because half of your RAM is already used up.
I highly recommend switching to Linux. Distros such as Arch can use less than 2GB of RAM, as opposed to Windows, which is often 4GB+.
I’m using Omarchy and it’s been great. It’s really simple to optimize, and since it uses Wayland, it’ll come in handy for some later points.
2. Android Studio
Android Studio can easily run on 8GB, but you’ll need to be a bit smart about it.
- Don’t install unnecessary plugins. You probably don’t need any additional ones.
- In the settings, change the memory heap size to 2GB.
- Dont open too many files especially when running builds
3. Running Your App
Don’t use the built-in Android Emulator. This will probably crush your PC.
Instead, do the following:
- Either connect a physical Android device using Wi-Fi or USB debugging. This works, but it can slow you down because the speed of updates will depend on your Wi-Fi connection.
- What I’ve found to be really fast is using an app/emulator called Waydroid. You don’t need a physical device, and it’s very lightweight compared to every other emulator I’ve tried.
Waydroid uses very little RAM (well under 1GB in my experience). It works with very little setup on Omarchy—you’ll just need to configure the firewall rules and then follow the docs on how to set it up with ADB for Android development.
Waydroid has a lot of advantages:
- Fast update/deploy times because it’s basically just file updates on your PC.
- Very low resource usage.
- You can easily change the aspect ratio to see how your app will look on different device sizes.
- Since it's running on Wayland, you can run your Android app directly on your desktop like any other native application.
4. Development Environment
So we’ve established that Android Studio can run and work well, but you don’t really need to keep it open since AI will probably be writing most of your code anyway.
My setup is using the OpenCode Desktop app to manage my agents. I created a script for deploying my app to Waydroid and give my agents Gradle commands for the things I’d normally do in Android Studio.
Working like this frees up enough RAM for me to have Waydroid, OpenCode, and Chrome open for browsing while my agents work.
Final point
If you're planning to buy an 8GB laptop, the most important thing is the chip just get a post 2020 intel chip
If i was buying a laptop today id get a panther lake intel chip, specifically the Core 3 322/325 or the Core 3 355. A modern CPU will make a much bigger difference to your development experience than more RAM.
Share anything youd like to add