iPadOS 26.4+ significantly reduced per-app memory limit from 6GB to 3GB on 8GB iPad, breaking memory-intensive apps

You’ve written your post like a bug report, which suggests you’re in the wrong place. If you want Apple to take action here, I recommend that you file a bug about this. Please post your bug number, just for the record.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

We're seeing the same thing, but with additional nuances. I've filed a bug report FB22883960. The strange thing here is that os_proc_available_memory() shows there's plenty to take, but the app still crashes upon reaching a reduced limit. Moreover, I think, the system is not fully aware of the lowered limit, or there is sort of a bug with the limit itself, as if it had been lowered unintentionally.

Are you running out of virtual or physical memory? Because the symptoms you’ve described suggest that you’re hitting the virtual limit. Kevin has been talking to a different developer about that subtlety in this thread.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

We track consumed memory level got from TASK_VM_INFO.phys_footprint. The app crashes at ~1.26GB on iPads with 3GB of RAM. At the same time os_proc_available_memory() shows there's still about 580MB available memory. Our apps are Unity-based games, so JavaScriptCore is definitely not involved. Moreover, we see crashes only on iPadOS versions 26.4+. On earlier versions (e.g. iPadOS 18.7) our games don't crash or crash much less frequently at around 1.8GB consumed memory.

Is this an actual crash? Or are you being jetsammed?

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

I'm not sure if I can really distinct the event types by the log report (.ips) now due to regular log format changes... From my POV, it doesn't look like a jetsam event. It does not have anything from the documentation page you've mentioned. On the other hand the log we have doesn't look like a regular crash report either. It does contain the following though:

"exception" : {"codes":"0x0000000000000001, 0x00000000000000c0","rawCodes":[1,192],"type":"EXC_BAD_ACCESS","signal":"SIGSEGV","subtype":"KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000000000c0"},
  "termination" : {"flags":0,"code":11,"namespace":"SIGNAL","indicator":"Segmentation fault: 11","byProc":"exc handler","byPid":599},
  "ktriageinfo" : "VM - (arg = 0x3) mach_vm_allocate_kernel failed within call to vm_map_enter\nVM - (arg = 0x3) mach_vm_allocate_kernel failed within call to vm_map_enter\nVM - (arg = 0x3) mach_vm_allocate_kernel failed within call to vm_map_enter\nVM - (arg = 0x3) mach_vm_allocate_kernel failed within call to vm_map_enter\nVM - (arg = 0x3) mach_vm_allocate_kernel failed within call to vm_map_enter\n",
  "vmregioninfo" : "0xc0 is not in any region....

Also, I've attached a pair of such logs to my FB mentioned earlier.

What you have there is a JSON crash report. The simplest way to get a human readable crash report from that is to save it to disk with the .ips extension and then Quick Look it in the Finder.

Having said that, just that small snippet is enough to see that this isn’t a jetsam event:

"termination" : {…,"code":11,"namespace":"SIGNAL","indicator":"Segmentation fault: 11",…},

Your app crashed due a memory exception. Now, that could be caused by a memory allocation failure, but you need some evidence before coming to that conclusion. I recommend that you start at the top with Diagnosing issues using crash reports and device logs.

Or if you want to post the crash report here, I’d be happy to take a look. Posting it is a bit tricky, and see Posting a Crash Report for specific advice on how to do that.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"