Detecting Display Energy Hotspots in Android Apps Mian Wan, Yuchen Jin, Ding Li and William G. J. Halfond University of Southern California Los Angeles, California, USA Email: fmianwan, yuchenji, dingli,
[email protected] Abstract—Energy consumption of mobile apps has become an is based on the display’s brightness. This brightness, in turn, important consideration as the underlying devices are constrained is controlled by either the end user or by the OS performing by battery capacity. Display represents a significant portion of an opportunistic dimming of the display. However, most modern app’s energy consumption. However, developers lack techniques smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy SII, are powered to identify the user interfaces in their apps for which energy by a new generation of screen technology, the OLED. For needs to be improved. In this paper, we present a technique this type of screen, brightness is still important [10]; however, for detecting display energy hotspots – user interfaces of a mobile app whose energy consumption is greater than optimal. the colors that are displayed also become important. Due to Our technique leverages display power modeling and automated the underlying technology, this type of screen consumes less display transformation techniques to detect these hotspots and energy when displaying darker colors (e.g., black) than lighter prioritize them for developers. In an evaluation on a set of popular ones (e.g., white). The use of these screens means there are Android apps, our technique was very accurate in both predicting enormous energy savings to be realized at the software level energy consumption and ranking the display energy hotspots.