Towards Verifying Android Apps for the Absence of No-Sleep Energy Bugs

The Android OS conserves battery life by aggressively turning off components, such as screen and GPS, while allowing application developers to explicitly prevent part of this behavior using the WakeLock API. Unfortunately, the inherent complexity of the Android programming model and developer errors often lead to improper use of WakeLocks that manifests as no-sleep bugs. To mitigate this problem, we have implemented a tool that verifies the absence of this kind of energy bugs w.r.t. a set of WakeLock specific policies using a precise, inter-procedural data flow analysis framework to enforce them. We run our analysis on 328 Android apps that utilize WakeLocks, verify 145 of them and shed light on the locking patterns employed and when these can be harmful. Further, we identify challenges that remain in order to make verification of Android apps even more precise.