An Investigation Into Energy-Saving Programming Practices for Android Smartphone App Development

Developing energy efficient mobile applications is an impor-tant goal for software developers as energy usage can di-rectly affect the usability of a mobile device. Unfortunately, developers lack guidance as to how to improve the energy efficiency of their implementation and which practices are most useful. In this paper we conducted a small-scale em-pirical evaluation of commonly suggested energy-saving and performance-enhancing coding practices. In the evaluation we evaluated the degree to which these practices were able to save energy as compared to their unoptimized code coun-terparts. Our results provide useful guidance for mobile app developers. In particular, we found that bundling network packets up to a certain size and using certain coding prac-tices for reading array length information, accessing class fields, and performing invocations all led to reduced energy consumption. However, other practices, such as limiting memory usage had a very minimal impact on energy us-age. These results serve to inform the developer community about specific coding practices that can help lower the over-all energy consumption and improve the usability of their applications