Detecting Energy Bugs in Android Apps Using Static Analysis

Abstract

Abstract. Energy bugs in Android apps are defects that can make Android systems waste much energy as a whole. Energy bugs detection in Android apps has become an important issue since smartphones usually operate on a limited amount of battery capacity and the existence of energy bugs may lead to serious drain in the battery power. This paper focuses on detecting two types of energy bugs, namely resource leak and layout defect, in Android apps. A resource leak is a particular type of energy wasting phenomena where an app does not release its acquired resources such as a sensor and GPS. A layout defect refers to a poor layout structure causing more energy consumption for measuring and drawing the layout. In this paper, we present a static analysis technique called SAAD, that can automatically detect energy bugs in a context-sensitive way. SAAD detects the energy bugs by taking an inter-procedural anaysis of an app. For resource leak analysis, SAAD decompiles APK file into Dalvik bytecodes files and then performs resource leak analysis by taking components call relationship analysis, inter-procedure and intra-procedure analysis. For detecting layout defect, SAAD firstly employs Lint to perform some traditional app analysis, then filters energy defects from reported issues. Our experimental result on 64 publicly-available Android apps shows that SAAD can detect energy bugs effectively. The accuracies of detecting resource leak and layout energy defect are 86.67% and 76.27% respectively.

Power Consumption Analysis, Measurement, Management, and Issues: A State-of-the-Art Review of Smartphone Battery and Energy Usage

“…This will result in a continuous energy consumption situation, which is known as resource leak. Some examples of resource leaks are shown [293] in Fig 21. • Layout defect: Bad application design makes its layout structure complex and inefficient. If there are too many widgets or the layout is too deep in the hierarchy, it will require resources such as CPU, memory, etc.…”

“…Jiang et al [293] presented an energy bug detection scheme based on a static analysis technique, named SAAD (Static Application Analysis Detector), which can detect resource leak and layout defect in an Android application. To detect resource leak, SAAD uses context-sensitive analysis that includes component call analysis and interand intra-procedural analysis.…”

Enforcing green code with Android lint

“…In [22], a technique called SAAD (Static Application Analysis Detector) focuses on resource leak and layout defect issues. To address the first issue, they decompile APK file into Dalvik bytecode and perform a components call relationship analysis.…”

Evaluation of Machine Learning Approaches for Android Energy Bugs Detection With Revision Commits

“…Banerjee1 et al categorize the energy inefficiencies into energy hotspots and energy bugs where energy hotspots describe scenarios where executing applications to consume a lot of battery power and energy bugs describe the situations where malfunctioning application prevents the smartphones from becoming idle [18]. Jiang et al proposed an inter-procedure and intra-procedure analysis to detect energy bugs and layout defects automatically [3]. Damavsevivcius et al presented a static analysis of energy measurement approaches by using software profiling and API based measurements [19].…”

“…Developers may introduce energy bugs such as resource leak and layout defect that drain the battery during the development process. The resource leak occurs when the application does not release its required resources, and the layout defect would consume more energy to measure and draw the layout of the application [3]. There are no quantitative and efficient approaches that can detect energy bugs in the fast-paced development procedure.…”