Manually clearing an Android ViewModel?

Question

Edit: This question is a bit out of date now that Google has given us the ability to scope ViewModel to navigation graphs. The better approach (rather

Answer 1

Im just writing library to address this problem: scoped-vm, feel free to check it out and I will highly appreciate any feedback. Under the hood, it uses the approach @Archie mentioned - it maintains separate ViewModelStore per scope. But it goes one step further and clears ViewModelStore itself as soon as the last fragment that requested viewmodel from that scope destroys.

I should say that currently whole viewmodel management (and this lib particularly) is affected with a serious bug with the backstack, hopefully it will be fixed.

Summary:

• If you care about ViewModel.onCleared() not being called, the best way (for now) is to clear it yourself. Because of that bug, you have no guaranty that viewmodel of a fragment will ever be cleared.
• If you just worry about leaked ViewModel - do not worry, they will be garbage collected as any other non-referenced objects. Feel free to use my lib for fine-grained scoping, if it suits your needs.