EDATA: Energy Debugging And Testing for Android

Energy consumption of software is becoming increasingly important in today’s mobile-focused world, but knowledge and techniques with which to measure energy consumption have lagged behind. This paper introduces a methodology for measuring the energy consumption of Android apps at the method level, and a concrete implementation of this methodology: EDATA. We evaluate EDATA by revisiting several Android code smells found in prior work to increase energy consumption, and by using a novel evaluation technique which allows us to generate a ground-truth for energy consumption using run-time as a proxy. Finally, we perform a case study on a real-world energy bug found in Adyen’s Android point of sale (POS) software. Our findings show that EDATA is able to accurately order methods by their energy consumption, and distinguish between different versions of a method. We also observed that debug mode has inconsistent effects on energy consumption, and that energy efficiency may not be consistent between devices. Finally, our case study shows that while developers and stakeholders agree that energy consumption is important, a lack of awareness and easy-to-use profiling prevents it from becoming a first-class metric in the development process.