What happens to memory in the heap area when an object is no longer needed for program execution?

When an object in the heap is no longer needed (i.e., there are no more references to it from active code), it becomes a candidate for garbage collection. In Android, which is based on Java/Kotlin, memory management is handled automatically by the garbage collector.

The garbage collector periodically checks objects in the heap and frees the memory occupied by objects that are unreachable from root references (such as from the call stack or static variables). This helps prevent memory leaks and makes efficient use of available memory.

Thus, when an object is no longer needed, its memory is automatically freed without the need to explicitly delete the object.