I am trying to fix outofMemory in my application that has a function as follows: public byte[] processByteArray (int bits) throws OutofMemoryError { byte [] arr =new byte [bits]; //do something and return arr; } I am not sure about what user provides for value bits and hence get exception Dalvik saying 536870812 byte allocation exceeds the 67108864 byte maximum heap size. So, I did something like this which is not good, but for now fixes issue: declare arr privately in the class and access that inside function like this : public byte[] processByteArray (int bits) throws OutofMemoryError { if(bits