E-Spector: Online energy inspection for Android applications

Energy consumption is one of the most important aspects of mobile apps. During energy testing, it is important for developers to understand not only the energy consumption rate of an app, but also why energy is consumed. However, existing energy testing tools are more concerned about the accuracy of energy estimation, while typically not providing explanations on why and how exactly energy has been consumed. This paper presents E-Spector, an online energy inspection method for Android apps, which can not only visualize the energy consumption of an app in an instant online manner, but also can tell what happened behind each energy hotspot on the energy curve. E-Spector relies on static analysis and app instrumentation to collect the activities from an app execution in real-time. Then it presents the activities on an instant energy curve, such that the user can easily tell what happened behind each energy spike. Experimental result shows that the energy estimation error of E-Spector is less than 10% and its overhead on energy consumption is about 4%. We also show case studies to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of E-Spector in energy monitoring, analysis and bug inspection.