An Empirical Study of the Energy Consumption of Android Applications

Energy is a critical resource for smartphones. However, developers who create apps for these platforms lack quantitative and objective information about the behavior of apps with respect to energy consumption. In this paper, we describe the results of our source-line level energy consumption study of 405 real-world market applications. Based on our study, we discover several interesting observations. For example, we find on average apps spend 61% of their energy in idle states, network is the most energy consuming component, and only a few APIs dominate non-idle energy consumption. The results of this study provide developers with objective information about how energy is consumed by a broad sample of mobile applications and can guide them in their efforts of improving the energy efficiency of their applications.