Android Battery Drain Problems? Purdue’s HUSH Will Help You Out

The Purdue team is now working to improve the tool so it can keep an eye on other functions on a phone to see which ones can be minimised to reduce the power they drain. Short of following our tips on how to make the most of your battery life, is there anything you can you do to squeeze a little extra juice out of your smartphone? Yes. As per a study carried out by researchers at Purdue University, Android apps contribute to a whopping 45.9% drain on the battery, 29% of which happens when the smartphone’s display is “off”.

Enter HUSH, which the Purdue crew have released at GitHub and which they reckon can save almost half of that wasted energy consumption. “However, we are in the process of making installation process easier, in particular, turning it into an app”, Y. Charlie Hu, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering, tells the Telegraph.

It then determines if it is useful or not to the smartphone user.

In dealing with this, however, Hu’s group has also tried to take into account user behaviour.

“The Hush system dynamically identifies app background activities that are not useful to the user experience on a per-app basis and suppresses such background app activities during screen-off to reduce the battery drain”, the researchers wrote in a blog post.

Hush is now only available to developers, but both Apple and Google are already implementing “low-power” modes in their most recent mobile operating systems, so it Hush could very well be integrated into one of those tools. “They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because of software bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android power control applications programming interfaces called wakelocks”. Basically bugs and inefficiencies due to insomniac-style apps that just simply wake up and can’t go back to sleep when it’s their rightful bedtime causes a fair amount of battery drain, say the researchers.

“The large image is that we need to double the battery life for smartphones”, Hu says.

“Much of the battery drain is caused by various apps when the screen is on and also legitimate maintenance functions”, he added. Called Hush, the tool could reduce the energy drain by about 16 percent.

In a paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery MobiCom 2015 conference in Paris this month, the researchers detailed their code-based solution to the problem, called HUSH.

The tool prioritizes the most commonly used apps and kills the apps that are rarely used by stopping their background app activities.