Google is lowering Android TV's hardware requirements: Is 1GB RAM enough?

One of the best things about the new Google TV Streamer is how much memory it has. With 4GB of RAM at its disposal, the Google TV Streamer is one of the better performing media streaming devices out there even if it doesn’t have a particularly fast processor. However, it’s an outlier in terms of memory capacity, as the vast majority of media streamers running Android have 1.5 to 2GB of RAM. Android doesn’t need a lot of memory to work, especially when you only need to run one app at a time like on TVs, but it still needs a minimum amount to deliver an acceptable user experience. Google believes that minimum is 1GB of RAM for some new TVs launching with Android TV 14.

Android TV 14 is the latest version of the TV-optimized version of the Android OS. Like its name implies, it’s based on Android 14, but a lot of the features in Android 14 for mobile devices aren’t applicable to Android 14 for TVs. TVs are an entirely different form factor with entirely different user expectations than handheld hardware like phones and tablets, after all.

Google accounts for those differences by enforcing different software and hardware requirements for TVs versus mobile equipment. Handheld devices, for example, must have at least 2GB of RAM in order to be certified by Google to run Android. 2GB of RAM in a phone probably isn’t enough for most people, which is why it’s the bare minimum that passes certification and only does so if the phone runs Android Go Edition. While that appears to be staying put, it seems the bare minimum amount of memory that a new Android TV device needs to pass certification is now only 1GB.

Previously, 1080p TVs had to have at least 1.5GB of RAM while 4K TVs had to have at least 2GB of RAM in order to be certified by Google to run Android TV. Now, 1080p TVs only need to ship 1GB of RAM and 4K TVs only need to ship 1.5GB of RAM to pass Android TV certification, though if they do, they have to declare themselves as low memory devices in order to take advantage of Android’s various low RAM optimizations. We learned about these new hardware requirements from a trusted source, who also told us that Google is working on further optimizations to make Android TV work better on TVs with only 1GB of RAM.

Although Android TV’s hardware requirements aren’t documented publicly, a recently merged code change we spotted in the AOSP Gerrit basically confirms the information we received. The code change lowers the minimum amount of RAM that can be allocated to TV emulator builds in Android Studio. Specifically, the minRam has been lowered to 1GB for Android TV builds, but interestingly it’s set to 2GB for Google TV builds. This suggests that Google TV has slightly more stringent hardware requirements, which makes sense since Google wants to provide a more consistent user experience.

Apparently, the window for OEMs to launch new devices with Android TV 12 has just closed, meaning these new hardware requirements will mostly apply to new devices launching with Android TV 14. We don’t know of any upcoming Android TV devices that will actually launch with only 1GB of RAM, but the fact that Google is now allowing it suggests that there might be some. Said devices will likely be incredibly affordable 1080p dongles sold in emerging markets, which should only help expand the global reach of Android TV OS, already on hundreds of millions of devices.