I've found LeakCanary incredibly useful at rooting out context related leaks you probably wouldn't otherwise think of. If you look under "no-op dependency" you

I've found LeakCanary incredibly useful at rooting out context related leaks you probably wouldn't otherwise think of. If you look under "no-op dependency" you'll find a solution to the issue you're describing. I've found it useful to have a leak canary specific build flavor or type, which only I ever see. For all other debug / production build leak canary is not initialized.