Understanding Application-Battery Interactions on Smartphones: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

Current generation of smartphones is running more and more complex applications that reduce the battery life to as short as several hours. Thus, it becomes very important to understand the diversities of applications installed on smartphones and how batteries are consumed across different applications. This paper presents a large-scale battery study on smartphones focusing on diversities in applications and users. Based on application and battery traces collected on over 80000 Android smartphones for a four-week period, we analyze the battery discharging patterns, the types of mobile applications, and the usage and energy consumption patterns for these applications. During the analysis, we introduce a novel method to calculate the energy consumption rate for each application based on coarse-grained battery data collected with a lightweight monitoring tool. Based on the results, we present some observations and discuss possible improvements on smartphone designs and mobile application development. We also compare our results to some previous studies wherever it is possible.