IssueTracker

First of all thanks for this detailed issue.

This issue had been investigated thoroughly when it was first reported internally. The surprising detail in this report is that the issue is not reproducible before 1.7. I will look into this.

The main problem with POBox is the fact that it is deprecated. Since 2021 Sony has been shipping new Xperia devices with Gboard pre-installed. Although we are aware that there is still a considerable amount of users still using POBox, the described behavior is caused by POBox's noncompliant behavior with InputConnection and InputMethodManager documentation. However, this is understandable since TextView implementation was also not respecting the behavior that is expected from Editors.

Ultimately we have decided to enforce the documented behavior with specifically regards to when editors should call InputMethodManager.updateSelection. Also, although unconfirmed, there were traces of possible custom code being included in Sony OEM images that changed how InputMethodManager was notified from TextView. If POBox also depended on something like this, it would be impossible for Compose code to replicate the same unknown behavior.

Just to be sure, it is dangerous to replace Compose TextField with Android View EditText as a workaround for this issue.

Compose 1.7 has a bug that causes ANR when the focus is on EditText. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/369354336

Another View-related bug in Compose 1.7 is that an Android View is focused by calling FocusManager.clearFocus(). https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/374031296

Perhaps there is a lack of testing of Compose 1.7 in combination with Android View. There is also a possibility that there are other fatal bugs related to View.

In other words, the only options for apps targeting the Japanese market that require POBox support are to continue using Compose 1.6 or to use EditText in combination with various workarounds.

Project: platform/frameworks/support
Branch: androidx-main
Author: Halil Ozercan <halilibo@google.com>
Link:      https://android-review.googlesource.com/3317256

Fix POBox keyboard issue

Fix POBox keyboard issue 
 
Fix: 373743376 
Fix: 329209241 
Test: NullableInputConnectionWrapperTest 
Change-Id: I94e0e598274fb88b255f977f9fbd50dfbbb1ecb1

Many thanks again for this report. Especially for giving us a huge clue in terms of what could be going wrong. The fix is now merged and I will ask for a cherry-pick into a stable release.

Yes, this fix is planned to be included in a future 1.7.x release.

Thanks for the fix. Sorry to follow up on this. is it possible for you to share specific release version/date for the stable version? We are waiting on this to decide on our direction.

I'm not sure lambda functions are the cause here.
At least lambdas we have control over as library users.

The first post has a code example that reproduces the memory leak but there are zero lambdas in use:

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        setContentView(ComposeView(this))
    }
}

So this essentially means that every app out there, which is in any of its activities using ComposeView(s) will leak those activities. Seems like a P1 to me.

Could be related to https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/264389670

There is a small demo project simulating any number of leaks (using fragment and further activities). This is a major issue, which blocking us from releasing many features using compose. They have reproducibility 100%, and have potentially huge impact on memory and performance. Could you please bump this issues to P1?

From issue 264389670 on 14/02/2023:

Please note that ComposeView is not the prerequisite for this leak, but the changing of the mutable state during hiding of composition in first activity. Although, the root cause could be the same, but this issue doesn't assume any root cause, but provides the setup for replication. Fragment is also not required. I will attach new setup, which does use only just 3 activities. And that's enough for memory leak.

Replication

• From MainActivity go to IntermediateActivity
• From IntermediateActivity go to ComposeActivity
• From ComposeActivity go back
• Checking profiler. Have memory leak

The memory leak is caused by an edge case, when the activity is stopped while Recomposer is holding some pending state for composition. By default, MonotonicClock used in Recomposer is paused on activity stop, causing it to suspend frame iteration. It works well in most cases, as state objects in other activities are not relevant for the composition in the stopped one. In this edge case, however, the same state is used in some activities or Recomposer has already queued an update before activity was stopped, and it continues to accumulate states from other activities until the first activity is restarted or destroyed. The issue is quite deeply rooted, as the fix is likely to change how compositions record states in background, so we are targeting next release for the fix.

If you are affected by this issue in the meantime, consider specifying a custom WindowRecomposerFactory in your app that doesn't pause MonotonicClock (or unpauses it periodically). The side effect of such custom Recomposer is that compositions will continue running animations when activity is in background.

This is in android-main which is now the 1.5 branch. It should be out with the next alpha of 1.5 but not stable until 1.5 is stable.

The following release(s) address this bug.It is possible this bug has only been partially addressed:

• androidx.compose.runtime:runtime:1.5.0-alpha03
• androidx.compose.ui:ui:1.5.0-alpha03

How does version 1.4.x handle this bug?

Lambdas like ComposableSingletons$Maintiner1Activitykt$lambda-1$1, as the name implies, are lazy allocated singleton instances that are stored globally. They will only be allocated once. This is not addressed by the above fix because it is not a leak but a singlton.