Toward Understanding and Detecting Battery Saver Issues in Android Apps

Poor battery life in mobile devices is one of the top pain points reported by smartphone users. To extend battery life, mobile OS manufacturers have implemented power-saving features that users can enable when needed. Android battery saver is one of those features and the feature improves battery life by limiting some of the capabilities offered by the OS. As a result, battery saver has implications for the functionality of Android apps and app developers need to suitably account for the feature to ensure that their apps behave as expected when the feature is enabled. Unfortunately, the effects of battery saver are not well documented and developers face issues in accounting for the feature. To better understand the effects of battery saver on app functionality, we present a study characterizing issues related to battery saver mode. The study is based on systematically collected dataset of documentation pages, bug reports, and forum questions relating to battery saver. We find 13 different categories of issues, most of which (10 out of 13) have considerable impact on app functionality. As a step toward helping developers in detecting battery saver issues, we devised a technique that uses static analysis to detect one type of issue. We evaluated the technique on a dataset of 38 Android apps and identified 41 issues with an F-Score of 0.91. We report identified issues to the developers of the corresponding apps, and to date, developers acknowledged 10 issues while already fixing six of them.