Energy consumption of mobile apps has become an important consideration as the underlying devices are constrained by battery capacity. Display represents a significant portion of an app's energy consumption. However, developers lack techniques to identify the user interfaces in their apps for which energy needs to be improved. In this paper, we present a technique for detecting display energy hotspots -user interfaces of a mobile app whose energy consumption is greater than optimal. Our technique leverages display power modeling and automated display transformation techniques to detect these hotspots and prioritize them for developers. In an evaluation on a set of popular Android apps, our technique was very accurate in both predicting energy consumption and ranking the display energy hotspots. Our approach was also able to detect display energy hotspots in 398 Android market apps, showing its effectiveness and the pervasiveness of the problem. These results indicate that our approach represents a potentially useful technique for helping developers to detect energy related problems and reduce the energy consumption of their mobile apps.

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Software piracy is an important concern for application developers. Such concerns are especially relevant in mobile application development, where piracy rates can be greater than 90%. The most common approach used by mobile developers to prevent piracy is code obfuscation. However, the decision to apply such transformations is currently made without regard to the impacts of obfuscations on another area of increasing concern for mobile application developers, energy usage. Because both software piracy and battery life are important concerns, mobile application developers must strike a balance between protecting their applications and preserving the battery lives of their users' devices. To help them make such choices, we conducted an empirical study of the effects of 18 code obfuscations on the amount of energy consumed by executing a total of 21 usage scenarios spread across 11 Android applications on four different mobile phone platforms. The results of the study indicate that, while obfuscations can have a statistically significant impact on energy usage and are more likely to increase energy usage than to decrease energy usage, the magnitudes of such impacts are unlikely to be meaningful to mobile application users. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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