Given the limited tool support for energy-saving strategies during the design phase of android applications, developing battery-aware, location-based android applications is a non-trivial task for developers. To this end, we propose eGEN, consisting of (1) a Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) and (2) a code generator to specify and create native battery-aware, location-based mobile applications. We evaluated eGEN by instrumenting the generated battery-aware code in five location-based, open-source android applications and compared the energy consumption with non-eGEN versions. The experimental results show 188 mA (8.34% of battery per hour) of average reduction in battery consumption while showing only 97 meters of degradation in location accuracy over three kilometers of a cycling path. Hence, we see this tool as a first step in helping developers write battery-aware code in location-based android applications. The GitHub repository with source code and all artifacts is available at https://github.com/Kowndinya2000/egen, and the tool demo video at https://youtu.be/Iadfh4cCw8I.

Abstract There is an increasing interest shown by researchers and developers in reducing the battery consumption of Android applications. Recently, the battery optimization features such as doze mode, app standby, background execution limits, and background location limits were introduced in the form of API changes. According to the API changes, application developers have to change their source code to manage the behavioral changes caused by operating system limitations. These battery optimization features are evolving rapidly, and the apps show unexpected behaviors until updating the source code. Also, developers find it difficult to cope with the changes. Therefore, there is a need to understand the behavioral changes, application developer's perceptions, and response patterns on the API changes to plan upcoming battery optimization features. In this article, we have collected the relevant GitHub issues from 225 open‐source Android repositories and performed a thematic analysis of collected data. This study analyzes the 391 related issues to answer three research questions. This study's important finding is that developers often post issues related to delayed app notifications, inconsistent background location updates, and suspended background tasks, and so on. We found that library developers are showing a quick response to API changes compared with application developers.

The number of Android applications using location information has increased significantly in recent years. Over time, there have been many improvements made to the location application programme interfaces (APIs), providing newer challenges and difficulties to the developers. Therefore, there is a need to summarise the existing knowledge and to highlight the unsolved issues to bring them to the attention of expert developers. The authors used the non‐negative matrix factorisation (NMF) method to identify the topics discussed by the developers on stack overflow. They found the following ten topics: fundamental, background service, global positioning system (GPS) provider, application error, location updates, programming aspects, GPS alternatives, location settings, NULL location, and location testing. In addition, they performed a manual analysis to add more qualitative insights into the results. They applied the NMF method on 3165 question posts and produced ten related topics. This study aims at organising the knowledge about location‐sensing strategies by answering three relevant research questions. They also analysed the most popular and unanswered topics in recent years. An important finding of this study is that the changes that occurred in the Google Location APIs have had a significant impact on the location‐sensing strategies followed by the developers.

The improper use of GPS and location-related APIs may result in abnormal battery drain in Android applications.Over the last few years, the developers' discussions on improving energy efficiency have been increased.In this paper, we mine StackOverflow to analyze and summarize the characteristics of developers' discussions of managing energy and accuracy-related requirements of location-based Android applications.We extracted 11,911 questions from StackOverflow and filtered 320 relevant questions to answer four research questions.We conducted a manual thematic analysis on relevant questions.Our study shows that the developers are concerned about energy consumption, but are unclear about their preferences as energy and accuracy evolved as conflicting requirements.