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Android's power management API can lead to 'no-sleep energy bugs,' according to Purdue researchers

Android's power management API can lead to 'no-sleep energy bugs,' according to Purdue researchers

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Researchers at Purdue University have taken a keen interest in Android's power efficiency as of late — recently, they published a study on how ads in apps often cause a battery hit, and now a study has just been published on the misuse of Android's power control (or "wakelock") APIs.

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Researchers at Purdue University have taken a keen interest in Android's power efficiency as of late — recently, they published a study on how ads in apps often cause a battery hit, and now a study has just been published on the misuse of Android's power control (or "wakelock") APIs. The wakelock API is designed for apps that need to run processes while the phone is idle — but as Professor Y. Charlie Hu said, "unfortunately, programmers are only human." When programmers make mistakes with using the wakelock API (which the Purdue researchers refer to as "no-sleep energy bugs"), a phone's battery can be drained in as little as five hours. As part of the research, 187 apps were analyzed, with 42 having these no-sleep energy bugs. That's less than one in four, but still a rather significant number of apps that can cause problems with battery life. The researcher team also put together a compiler that can determine where in an app's code a no-sleep bug might exist — hopefully this compiler can be made available to developers to help them squash these bugs before releasing their apps