An empirical study on managing energy and accuracy requirements of location based android applications

Abstract

The improper use of GPS and location-related APIs may result in abnormal battery drain in Android applications. Over the last few years, the developers' discussions on improving energy efficiency have been increased. In this paper, we mine StackOverflow to analyze and summarize the characteristics of developers' discussions of managing energy and accuracy-related requirements of location-based Android applications. We extracted 11,911 questions from StackOverflow and filtered 320 relevant questions to answer four research questions. We conducted a manual thematic analysis on relevant questions. Our study shows that the developers are concerned about energy consumption, but are unclear about their preferences as energy and accuracy evolved as conflicting requirements.