EXPERIENCE: Developing a Usable Battery Drain Testing and Diagnostic Tool for the Mobile Industry

In the past decade, numerous efforts, from both academia and industry, have been made to make batteries in mobile devices last longer on a single charge. Our own research identified a new class of software bugs called energy bugs [1-4] that cause mobile software to quickly drain battery. We built and released numerous tools to detect and mitigate these bugs [2,4,5]. We also suggested energy optimizations in the OS; for instance, OS can suppress activities of background apps that are not being opened by the user [6].