Techniques and apparatuses are described that implement smartphone-based power-efficient radar processing and memory provisioning for detecting gestures. The described techniques map different situations that occur with a user to different memory states. A radar processing system's memory management module allocates at least one memory pool according to an active memory state. As the radar system detects different situations that occur with the user, the memory management module reallocates the memory pool for the appropriate memory state, which can adjust a power mode of the radar system. In some cases, physically separate memories may be allocated for different memory states, which respectively include one or more sequences that are executed by different processors. The memory management module enables efficient use of available power and available memory for radar processing such that a total amount of power and a total size of memory used may be significantly reduced for detecting gestures.