Recent advances in cloud computing have simplified the way that both software development and testing are performed. Unfortunately, this is not true for battery testing for which state of the art test-beds simply consist of one phone attached to a power meter. These test-beds have limited resources, access, and are overall hard to maintain; for these reasons, they often sit idle with no experiment to run. In this paper, we propose to share existing battery testing setups and build BatteryLab, a distributed platform for battery measurements. Our vision is to transform independent battery testing setups into vantage points of a planetary-scale measurement platform offering heterogeneous devices and testing conditions. In the paper, we design and deploy a combination of hardware and software solutions to enable BatteryLab's vision. We then preliminarily evaluate BatteryLab's accuracy of battery reporting, along with some system benchmarking. We also demonstrate how BatteryLab can be used by researchers to investigate a simple research question.

There has been a growing interest in measuring and optimizing the power efficiency of mobile apps. Traditional power evaluations rely either on inaccurate software-based solutions or on ad-hoc testbeds composed of a power meter and a mobile device. This demonstration presents BatteryLab, our solution to share existing battery testing setups to build a distributed platform for battery measurements. Our vision is to transform independent battery testing setups into vantage points of a planetary-scale measurement platform offering heterogeneous devices and testing conditions. We demonstrate BatteryLab functionalities by investigating the energy efficiency of popular websites when loaded via both Android and iOS browsers. Our demonstration is also live at https://batterylab.dev/.