Reducing Power Consumption in Android Applications

Battery consumption in mobile hand held devices is an important issue, given the recent slew of such devices with advanced computing capabilities. In this paper we propose some software based approaches to reduce the power consumption of a mobile device running an Android application. In the first approach we consider a typical Android application. We try to minimize the power consumption by reducing the main window surface size. In the second approach we consider the applications having higher graphics or rendering requirements and utilize surface view for rending the content, such as games, internet browser and video player, which contribute most in draining the battery. Our approach involves removing the surface view and directly utilizing the application's main window surface. We present various experiments to measure the power consumption for every scenario. We also discuss about advantages and problems of the proposed methods along with some possible solutions.