Android power management: Current and future trends

Saving power of Android enabled devices have become a significant issue with 400,000 such devices being activated daily. Android smartphones and tablets offer several power hungry hardware components and the app developers are exploiting these components at disposal to provide revolutionary user experience. But the battery life has not increased at the same pace to support the power demand. Thus many researches have been carried out to investigate how to minimize the power consumption in smartphones. This paper reports four different research themes towards the reduction of smartphone power consumption. Efforts have been made to survey Android power saving apps available in Google play Apps store as the basis to find out different power saving approaches, operations and limitations. Then we present four different avenues to prolong the batter life of Android devices. The first two approaches include usage pattern analysis to generate power saving profiles. The advantage being that the power saving profiles are customized to actual user behavior. Integrating a photovoltaic film on top of the smartphone and tablet touch screen to generate electricity is also mentioned. The usage pattern based power saving profile generation has several privacy concerns which are discussed and countermeasures are proposed. Some emerging security attacks are also briefed.