New tool can improve android battery life by killing background apps

Let’s say your Candy Crush app wakes up your phone to alert you that you have more lives available now.

A new software tool called HUSH, developed by US-based Purdue University, claims to reduce the drain in battery caused by apps even when the phone’s display is off. The reduction in battery drain contributes to a marginal increase in overall battery life of the smartphone.HUSH is available at no cost and could be useful for Android owners constantly complaining about having to charge their devices multiple times a day. “However, we are in the process of making installation process easier, in particular, turning it into an app”, the professor of electrical and computer engineering said.

“During screen-off, the phone hardware should enter the sleep state, draining close to zero power”, Hu said. As a result, an app might wake up to do something useful while the phone’s idle, but afterwards, it fails to let the phone go back to sleep. As such, background activities are only suppressed on a per-app and usage basis depending on which apps are most commonly used.

Hu and his team of researchers tested out 2,000 smartphones, namely Samsung Galaxy S4, and its predecessor Samsung Galaxy S3 for battery consumption during active screen and inactive modes.

The researchers hope to make further advancements to double the battery life for smartphones. According to the researchers, a fair chunk of battery drain is actually caused by bugs and inefficiencies due to insomniac-style apps that wake up and simply can’t go back to sleep when it’s their rightful bedtime.

HUSH does this by killing all the background activities that keep running due to the initiation of Android apps when the user turns off the screen of the device.

The study revealed that, in daily use, 45.9 percent of battery drain due to Android apps. The research paper was authored by Purdue graduate students Xiaomeng Chen, Abhilash Jindal and Ning Ding; and Intel researchers Maruti Gupta and Rath Vannithamby.

“We presented the first study a few years back showing wakelock bugs could cause significant energy drain”, Hu says. “The other surprise from the in-the-wild study was that about 18.5 per cent of the daily battery drain happens from so called maintenance activities including periodic WiFi beacons, WiFi scanning, and Cellular Paging”, he says. The researchers plan to do this soon so that all Android users can use it.