Catalog of energy patterns for mobile applications

Abstract

Software engineers make use of design patterns for reasons that range from performance to code comprehensibility. Several design patterns capturing the body of knowledge of best practices have been proposed in the past, namely creational, structural and behavioral patterns. However, with the advent of mobile devices, it becomes a necessity a catalog of design patterns for energy efficiency. In this work, we inspect commits, issues and pull requests of 1027 Android and 756 iOS apps to identify common practices when improving energy efficiency. This analysis yielded a catalog, available online, with 22 design patterns related to improving the energy efficiency of mobile apps. We argue that this catalog might be of relevance to other domains such as Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things. As a side contribution, an analysis of the differences between Android and iOS devices shows that the Android community is more energy-aware.RQ2: How different are mobile app practices addressing energy efficiency across different platforms?We found that Android developers have higher awareness towards energy efficiency improvement than iOS developers. We show the prevalence of each energy pattern in the two platforms and discuss potential causes. This paper makes the following contributions:-We propose a catalog of energy patterns with a detailed description and instructions for mobile app developers and designers. It is available online: https: //tqrg.github.io/energy-patterns, and we welcome contributions from the community as pull request. -We provide a dataset with 1563 commits, issues, and pull requests in which mobile app development practitioners address the energy efficiency of their apps. The dataset and collection tools are available online: https://github. com/TQRG/energy-patterns.-We compare energy efficiency awareness in mobile app development in different platforms (viz. Android and iOS).1 StackOverflow is a collaborative Web platform for questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming.

Do Energy-Oriented Changes Hinder Maintainability?

“…1 to analyze how energy commits affect the maintainability of Android applications. It comprises the following steps: 1) Combine the datasets from related work that classifies the activities of developers addressing energy efficiency in mobile apps [4], [13], [20], [21]. 2) Collect regular commits from Android apps to be used as baseline.…”

“…To improve energy efficiency, NetGuard's developers decided to implement the pattern Power Save Mode [13]. The following snippet presents the required code changes 2 : An instance of BroadcastReceiver is created to implement the handler of Power Save Mode events.…”

“…How: We use the classification of developers activities made in previous work [4], [13], [20], [21] to group energy-oriented commits and analyze maintainability independently.…”

“…Despite similar, different datasets use different labels to indicate the same pattern. For example, the same pattern is labeled as Power [13]. We map these and other identical categories into unique labels 3 .…”

“…Git Repository: https://github.com/einmalfel/PodListen Commit: 2ed5a65 Change: Add a preference in which users can opt to download new content (i.e., podcasts) only when the smartphone is connected to the charger. This is an implementation of the energy patterns User Knows Best and Power Awareness [13].…”