Anole: A Case for Energy-Aware Mobile Application Design

TLDR

Battery life is a key user experience that limits hardware and application design, yet energy‑aware app design remains largely unexplored. This paper argues that mobile applications offer a substantial, untapped opportunity for energy savings and should be a focus for future device efficiency. The authors introduce Anole, a framework that inserts an energy‑adaptation layer through APIs and policies to guide application state changes. Experiments on two Android apps demonstrate that Anole can significantly reduce energy consumption by dynamically adjusting application states.

Abstract

Battery lifetime, which is one of the most significant user experiences for mobile devices, strongly restricts the functional design of hardware architecture and applications. Among all the aspects of energy saving for mobile devices, energy-aware application design is one of the main areas that has not yet been explored comprehensively. In this paper, we argue for the case for energy-aware mobile application design since there is pretty large space for energy saving on applications and we believe this is a promising area for future energy saving on mobile devices. To support energy aware mobile application design, we propose a framework called Anole, aiming to add an energy adaptation layer by providing a set of APIs and adaptation policies. Our experiments with two applications on Android show that Anole is able to save a large amount of energy by triggering applications to change states accordingly.