Ebserver: Automating Resource-Usage Data Collection of Android Applications

Abstract

Mobile applications are a typical component of people’s routines. Because of that, there is fierce competition for mobile users’ attention, creating pressure for mobile developers to optimize their applications in a number of ways, such as making them faster, reducing their energy consumption, or their memory usage. To understand their application resource usage, developers need to execute their app, collect data from that execution and analyze how it behaves. Researchers must also go through this process when evaluating optimizations and techniques to reduce resource usage. This error-prone experimentation process can take hours of repetitive work if done manually. In this paper, we present EBSERVER, a general-purpose measurement automation tool to collect Android device data during application executions. EBSERVER is simple to configure and extend, requiring very little instrumentation code to use. It enables users to collect execution metrics on a per-process basis from an application execution automatically. Examples of such metrics include energy consumption, CPU usage, execution time, and memory usage. EBSERVER makes it possible for applications to run multiple times in an automated manner, eliminates the need to predict the time that applications or benchmarks will run in an experiment, and is compatible with contemporary Android UI testing tools. EBSERVER has been employed in multiple experiments, including experiments that do not have involvement of its authors.