Reducing power consumption in graphic intensive Android applications

With the ubiquity and increased usage of mobile devices with higher processing capability, power consumption in such devices is an important issue. In this paper we propose a software based approach to reduce the power consumption of an Android application which is having higher graphics or rendering requirements. Graphics intensive applications such as games, internet browser and video player contribute most in draining the battery. Therefore, we concentrate most on such applications for reducing the power consumption. Our approach involves removing the surface view and directly utilizing the application´s main window surface. We conduct an experiment to measure the power consumption when running an application with and without using surface view, and show that we get an improvement in the consumption. We also discuss about advantages and problems of the proposed method along with some possible solutions.