Smartphone Background Activities in the Wild: Origin, Energy Drain, and Optimization

Abstract

As new iterations of more powerful and better connected smartphones emerge, their limited battery life remains a leading factor adversely affecting the mobile experience of millions of smartphone users. While it is well-known that many apps can drain battery even while running in background, there has not been any study that quantifies the extent and severity of such background energy drain for users in the wild. To extend battery life, various new features are being incorporated within the phone, one of them being preventing applications from running in background, i.e., when the screen is off, but their impact is largely unknown. This paper makes several contributions. First, we present a large-scale measurement study that performs an in-depth analysis of the activities of various apps running in background on thousands of phones in the wild. Second, we quantify the amount of battery drain by all such background activities and possible energy saving. Third, we develop a metric to measure the usefulness of background activities that is personalized to each user. Finally, we present a system called HUSH (screen-off optimizer) that monitors the metric online and automatically identifies and suppresses background activities during screen-off periods that are not useful to the user experience. In doing so, our proposed HUSH saves screen-off energy of smartphones by 15.7% on average while incurring minimal impact on the user experience with the apps.