IssueTracker

RecyclerView registers an observer (https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/support/+/androidx-master-dev/recyclerview/recyclerview/src/main/java/androidx/recyclerview/widget/RecyclerView.java#1201) that is only unregistered manually, by either setting the adapter again, or calling unregisterAdapterDataObserver externally.

PreferenceFragmentCompat sets this adapter (PreferenceGroupAdapter), which implicitly registers an observer. PreferenceFragmentCompat never sets the adapter to null when the view is destroyed, so the observer keeps references to the RecyclerView and doesn't get gc'ed.

I've worked around this by explicitly setting the adapter to null in an override of onDestroyView, but since my component doesn't explicitly have ownership of the list handling, I'd argue that PreferenceFragmentCompat should do this cleanup.

It would be solved by setting the RecyclerView adapter to null in the fragment's onDestroyView.

Here's a memory dump.