EcoDroid: An Approach for Energy-Based Ranking of Android Apps

The ever increasing complexity of mobile apps comes with a higher energy cost, creating an inconvenience for users on batter-constrained mobile devices. At the same time, due to the meteoric rise of the numbers apps provisioned on app repositories, there are often multiple apps from the same category (e.g., weather, dictionary) that provide similar features. In spite of similar functionality, the apps may present very different energy costs, due to the choices made in their design and construction. Given apps with similar features, users would prefer an app with the least energy cost. However, app repositories are currently lacking information about relative energy cost of apps in a given category, forcing the users to blindly choose an app for installation without a clear understanding of its energy implications. To address this issue, we have developed EcoDroid, an approach that ranks apps from the same category based on their energy consumption. To that end, EcoDroid uses both static and dynamic analyses to estimate energy consumption of apps in the same category and rank them accordingly. Our initial experiments have demonstrated the ability of EcoDroid in accurately ranking the energy cost of multiple apps from a particular category.