Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2016

Abstract

As Android platform becomes more and more popular, a large amount of Android applications have been developed. When developers design and implement Android applications, power consumption management is an important factor to consider since it affects the usability of the applications. Thus, it is important to help developers adopt proper strategies to manage power consumption. Interestingly, today, there is a large number of Android application repositories made publicly available in sites such as GitHub. These repositories can be mined to help crystalize common power management activities that developers do. These in turn can be used to help other developers to perform similar tasks to improve their own Android applications. In this paper, we present an empirical study of power management commits in Android applications. Our study extends that of Moura et al. who perform an empirical study on energy aware commits; however they do not focus on Android applications and only a few of the commits that they study come from Android applications. Android applications are often different from other applications (e.g., those running on a server) due to the issue of limited battery life and the use of specialized APIs. As subjects of our empirical study, we obtain a list of open source Android applications from F-Droid and crawl their commits from Github. We get 468 power management commits after we filter the commits using a set of keywords and by performing manual analysis. These 468 power management commits are from 154 different Android applications and belong to 15 different application categories. Furthermore, we use open card sort to categorize these power management commits and we obtain 6 groups which correspond to different power management activities. Our study also reveals that for different kinds of Android application (e.g., Games, Connectivity, Navigation, Internet, Phone & SMS, Time, etc.), the dominant power management activities differ. For example, the percentage of power management commits belonging to Power Adaptation activity is larger for Navigation applications than those belonging to other categories.

Keywords

Empirical study, Mining software repository, Power consumption, Power management

Discipline

Communication Technology and New Media | Technology and Innovation

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

Proceedings of the 2016 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories: May 14-15, Austin, Texas

First Page

37

Last Page

48

ISBN

9781450341868

Identifier

10.1145/2901739.2901748

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2901739.2901748

Download

Share

COinS