Android OS has AlarmManager function, which launches an application at a specified time regardless of state of the device. If the device is in sleep state at the specified time, this function wakes the device up and performs the application. For example, a news application can periodically update information using this function. We can expect that an application with frequent alarming may be a battery draining application.
Android OS has function with which an application can be launched at the specified time even if the device is in screen-off state at the time. These application behaviors also consume battery without user’s operation. Naturally, it is expected that for users to understand these behaviors is not easy. It is reported that the most important issue of smartphones is battery . Thus, detecting power consuming applications is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying applications which largely drain battery in Screen-off state in Android devices. We monitor the wake-up of Android devices and estimate the power consumption of each application based on the monitoring results. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can identify power draining applications effectively.
Android devices in screen-off state will go into sleep state without operation. In sleep state, CPU processing, display emitting, and communication are highly restricted. By the restriction, power consumption is significantly saved.
In this section, we discuss ways of applying our method. We applied our method by modifying Android OS. However, alarm information can be obtained with unmodified OS, using dumpsys alarm command by a non-root user. Thus, this method can be easily applied to usual devices in general market. Monitoring WakeLock requires OS modification. This method can be applied by installing modified OS for reference devices. We think this method is useful for application venders and application market administrators for evaluating applications.
