How to increase Memory usage for an App in Windows Phone

Windows Phone is gradually getting matured day by day. Considering the current situation, the Windows Phone environment gives a restrictive environment where app developers are restricted to do certain things if not specified beforehand. The developer cannot use Library, Camera, Sensors or even memory at sometimes if not defined beforehand.

A Windows Phone App is limited to use 150 MB at max. But sometimes it is well a requirement to have more than this limit at least for high spec devices to run. To solve this problem, you can define a capability on your App to ensure you have high availability of application memory.

To increase the size of memory usage we add the following node to the Manifest file of Windows Phone App:

<App>
 <FunctionalCapabilities>
    <FunctionalCapability Name="ID_FUNCCAP_EXTEND_MEM"/>
  </FunctionalCapabilities>
</App>

It is worth mentioning, the Manifest editor tool is not yet capable to display this capability and it is hidden from the tool, but you can still use it.

There is another Functional Capability which will ensure the large memory is available before running the application and opt out the Low memory phones from running the app. If this is your requirement you can use :

<App>
 <Requirements>
    <Requirements Name="ID_REQ_MEMORY_300"/>
  </Requirements>
</App>

If you use the above capability, the App won’t appear in Windows Phone Store for lower memory phones and it cant be installed in low end devices.

Based on your requirement, you can increase the size boundary from 150 MB to 300 MB or for some devices upto 1GB of application memory usage.

I hope this will help you in real world app development.

Thank you for reading.