Investigating Decreasing Energy Usage in Mobile Apps via Indistinguishable Color Changes

Changing UI colors is an effective approach for reducing app energy usage for devices with OLED displays. Unfortunately, even when care is taken to ensure that visual properties of the user interface (UI) are maintained (e.g., contrast ratios between text and background elements), such changes often compromise the aesthetics of the application. In this paper, we investigate whether indistinguishable changes, changes that are less likely to compromise UI aesthetics, can also result in significant energy savings. To answer this question, we performed an empirical study of 10 Android applications. The results of the study are promising as they demonstrate that, in most cases, the changes are acceptable to users and still result in modest reductions in energy usage.