eDoctor: Automatically Diagnosing Abnormal Battery Drain Issues on Smartphones

The past few years have witnessed smartphones going from closed platforms containing only pre-installed applications to open platforms hosting a variety of thirdparty applications. Unfortunately, this change has also led to a rapid increase in Abnormal Battery Drain (ABD) problems caused by software defects, misconfiguration, or environmental changes. Such issues can drain a fullycharged battery within a couple of hours. We present a practical tool called eDcotor to help average users troubleshoot ABD issues on smartphones. eDoctor leverages the concept of execution phase to capture an app’s energy consumption behavior, which is key to identify abnormal apps. Based on the diagnosis result, eDoctor suggests appropriate repair solutions to users. 1 Abnormal Battery Drain ABD refers to abnormally fast draining of a smartphone’s battery that is not caused by normal usage. From a user’s point of view, the device previously had reasonable battery life under typical usage, but at some point the battery unexpectedly started to drain faster than usual. As a result, whereas users might comfortably and reliably use their phones for an entire day, with an ABD problem their batteries might unexpectedly exhaust within hours. In our work [2], we randomly sampled 213 real world battery issues from popular Android forums. We found that 92% of them were ABD, while only 8% were due to normal, heavier usage. Many of these ABD incidents affected a significant number of users. For instance, a release of “Facebook for Android” app , with an estimated 12 million users at that time [1], had a bug that prevented the phone from entering sleep mode, thus draining the battery in as rapidly as 2.5 hours.