MALLOC and IHEAP_Malloc() are identical, just as FREE and IHEAP_Free() are identical. In earlier versions of the BREW SDK, malloc was part of the IHEAP Interface, and was later made into a helper function for ease of use. Both are still available for backward compatibility, but it is recommended that, use MALLOC and FREE rather than IHEAP_Malloc() and IHEAP_Free().

An app needs to create IHeap interface only when it wants to get current memory usage statistics (IHEAP_GetMemStats()) or check if a memory block of a certain size can be allocated (IHEAP_CheckAvail()).