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In mobile devices, the battery is a limited resource and mobile apps are designed with this constraint in mind. To speed up development, app developers often use third-party libraries. Researchers have found that third-party libraries for ads and billing excessively use mobile resources. Other often used third-party libraries such as Android third-party HTTP libraries have received less attention from research regarding energy consumption. To fill this gap, we investigated whether popular Android third-party HTTP libraries vary in energy consumption. In addition, we checked whether there is a correlation between performance and energy consumption. To achieve this goal, we performed a controlled experiment. We created 45 different versions of a custom app and explored the energy consumption and performance of eight popular Android third-party HTTP libraries in five typical use cases. We found that there is a significant variance of energy consumption between the selected Android third-party HTTP libraries. We assume that the energy drivers are related to the internal structure of the Android third-party HTTP libraries, in particular to the handling of asynchronous tasks and the creation of multiple threads in the background. We did not find significant correlation between performance and energy consumption in most of the versions. Our results will help app developers make better choices when selecting Android third-party HTTP libraries.

Empirical studies have shown that mobile applications that do not drain battery usually get good ratings from users. To make mobile application energy efficient many studies have been published that present refactoring guidelines and tools to optimize the code. However, these guidelines cannot be generalized w.r.t energy efficiency, as there is not enough energy related data for every context. Existing energy enhancement tools/profilers are mostly prototypes applicable to only a small subset of energy related problems. In addition, the existing guidelines and tools mostly address the energy issues once they have already been introduced. My goal is to add to the existing energy related data by evaluating the energy consumption of various code smell refactorings and third-party libraries used in Android development. Data from such evaluations could provide generalized contextual guidelines that could be used during application development to prevent the introduction of energy related problems. I also aim to develop a support tool for the Android Studio IDE that could give meaningful recommendations to developers during development to make the application code more energy efficient.