GEDCOM Viewer (Android Edition) is designed for mobile devices running the Android 2.2 operating system or a later version. It is ideal for use on small tablet computers, but can be used on mobile phones that have external storage ("SD Card") capability and a sufficient amount of memory (RAM). GEDCOM Viewer is very convenient to use on a device having, say, a seven-inch screen of 800x480 pixels. It should be usable on devices with smaller screens, though as the screen size decreases the formatting of the information displayed is likely to be more cumbersome.
GEDCOM Viewer assumes that GEDCOM files to be displayed have been downloaded by the user to the external storage medium. GEDCOM Viewer also uses external storage to maintain a cache of "map" files, which index the information in the GEDCOM files to speed up access. In general, the map files are ten percent or less of the size of the original GEDCOM files, and the amount of storage used for the cache of map files is configurable by the user.
GEDCOM Viewer is designed to try to use as little RAM as possible, but as a rough rule of thumb you should expect that the application will actively use about 1K of RAM ("heap") for each individual in the GEDCOM being displayed. So, for example, a GEDCOM file containing information on 10,000 individuals would consume about 10MB of RAM while it is actively being displayed. The amount of RAM you have available on your device is likely to be the limiting factor on how big a GEDCOM file you can display. In tests on a small tablet equipped with a total of 512MB of RAM, the application was easily able to display an 11MB GEDCOM file containing information on over 13,000 individuals and 4,500 families, using a heap size of about 16MB. On devices with less RAM, or on which a lot of other applications are active, the amount of RAM available to GEDCOM Viewer may be smaller, which will effectively limit the size of the GEDCOM files that can be displayed.