That's not quite true. Garbage Collector isn't a developer's magical ticket to write careless memory hogs. Android devices have a per app (process really) limit of how much heap memory they can consume. It can be anything in between 32MB to 256MB depending on the device. So developers still have to be very careful to not consume any more memory than absolutely necessary so that their app continues to work on as many devices as possible. Besides frequent GC will pause the app and ruin the experience - so there's that to worry about too.