Identifying Sources of Energy Consumption for Android Applications: A Pilot Study

Over the years, smartphones have become vital devices for personal, and commercial uses. The number of smartphones has increased dramatically offering many opportunities and yet, challenges. Recently, more attention has been paid for the energy consumed by smartphone applications due to its limited power source (i.e., batteries). Mobile operating systems apply optimizations to power management that are not common with traditional operating systems, and application developers need to consider energy optimization as an important requirement. The need to optimize power consumption has given rise to the development of tools to analyze and identify how and when power is used. In this paper, we present and compare various tools aimed at performing this type of analysis for Android applications.