The Android 17 developer preview raises the per-app memory ceiling on devices with 4 GB of RAM from 512 MB to 768 MB, and makes the value readable through the activity manager. For a game with a large texture set this is real headroom, but it arrives with a condition: the limit is a ceiling, not a reservation.
On a device under pressure the low-memory killer can still reclaim a backgrounded game, and the new preview adds a callback just before that happens. Handling it well means saving state and dropping GPU resources, in that order, because driver allocations are the part that survives worst.
We measured the new limit on two devices and both reported the higher number, but only one actually kept a 700 MB process alive while a video call ran in the foreground. Treat the reported limit as the best case and budget for the older number.