Blame Programming Errors For Poor Battery Life Of Your Smartphone
Smartphone users across the globe face issues with their device’s poor battery life. Often, people tend to blame the manufacturers for this problem, but now a team of researchers from Purdue University comprising of doctoral students Abhinav Pathak and Abhilash Jindal, and Purdue professors of electrical and computer engineering Charlie Hu and Samuel Midkiff have found a set of programming errors to be responsible for significantly draining a smartphone’s battery. These "no-sleep energy bugs" found in apps over-ride the manufacturers’ default sleep mode to always keep the phone active, thereby exhausting the smartphone’s battery life.
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When app developers are provided with APIs from the manufacturers, they are to manage the power control in a careful way, so as to keep the phone active only for durations required to perform certain dedicated actions. However, mishandling these power control APIs called ‘wakelocks’ lead to programming bugs which do not let the phone engage with the manufacturer’s default sleep mode. To detect these bugs, researchers have developed a tool which translates app codes to binary and then detects the presence of “no-sleep energy bugs†within the code. Of the 187 Android apps studied by the team, the tool successfully detected the bug’s presence in 42. Though the study was primarily focused on Android devices, researchers believe the problem to exist even in other brands. The concerned research paper will be presented at MobiSys 2012, to be held from June 25-29 in the United Kingdom.
Source: 'No-sleep energy bugs' drain smartphone batteries
#-Link-Snipped-# Image Credit: www.digitaltrends.com[/caption]
When app developers are provided with APIs from the manufacturers, they are to manage the power control in a careful way, so as to keep the phone active only for durations required to perform certain dedicated actions. However, mishandling these power control APIs called ‘wakelocks’ lead to programming bugs which do not let the phone engage with the manufacturer’s default sleep mode. To detect these bugs, researchers have developed a tool which translates app codes to binary and then detects the presence of “no-sleep energy bugs†within the code. Of the 187 Android apps studied by the team, the tool successfully detected the bug’s presence in 42. Though the study was primarily focused on Android devices, researchers believe the problem to exist even in other brands. The concerned research paper will be presented at MobiSys 2012, to be held from June 25-29 in the United Kingdom.
Source: 'No-sleep energy bugs' drain smartphone batteries
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