A Study on the Energy Consumption and Performance of Single-Activity Android Apps

Context. A new architecture for Android apps has been recently introduced. It is called single-activity app architecture and it results in Android apps with a completely different structure and runtime behaviour when transitions among screens. Goal. The goal of this research is to assess the impact of the new single-activity architecture on the energy consumption, CPU usage, and memory usage of Android apps. Method. We developed four Android apps: two apps following the single-activity architecture (with basic and advanced complexity) and two apps following the traditional architecture (with basic and advanced complexity). Then, we measure all of them in terms of energy consumption, CPU usage, and memory usage and statistically analyse the collected measures. Results. Our results show a significant difference between single-activity and multiple-activity architecture for the dataset of Energy consumption (advanced complexity app) and Memory usage (basic complexity app) measurements. Conclusions. This study provides evidence that there is a significant difference in energy consumption between the single-activity and multiple-activity architecture on both basic and advanced Android apps.