User interaction-based profiling system for Android application tuning

Abstract

Quality improvement in mobile applications should be based on the consideration of several factors, such as users' diversity in spatio-temporal usage, as well as the device's resource usage, including battery life. Although application tuning should consider this practical issue, it is difficult to ensure the success of this process during the development stage due to the lack of information about application usage. This paper proposes a user interaction-based profiling system to overcome the limitations of development-level application debugging. In our system, the analysis of both device behavior and energy consumption is possible with fine-grained process-level application monitoring. By providing fine-grained information, including user interaction, system behavior, and power consumption, our system provides meaningful analysis for application tuning. The proposed method does not require the source code of the application and uses a web-based framework so that users can easily provide their usage data. Our case study with a few popular applications demonstrates that the proposed system is practical and useful for application tuning.