Energy Consumption and Efficiency in Mobile Applications: A User Feedback Study

The energy efficiency of mobile applications has been a highly tackled research problem within the last years. Many research groups have focused on optimizing the hardware of mobile devices, as well as their middleware and applications, increasing both the devices´ uptime and their users´ satisfaction. However, only scarce work has analyzed whether users notice and care about energy-efficiency problems in mobile applications. Thus, in this paper, we address these questions by evaluating a large set of user comments extracted from the Google Play market place for Android applications. We analyze more than 9 million user comments and show that more than 18% of all commented applications have comments complaining about energy consumption. Besides, we identify major causes for the inefficiency of many mobile applications.