Going green: an exploratory analysis of energy-related questions

The popularity of smartphones --- small computers that run on battery power --- has exploded in the last decade. Unsurprisingly, power consumption is an overarching concern for mobile app developers, who are anxious to learn about power-related problems that are encountered by others. In this paper, we present an empirical study exploring the characteristics of energy-related questions posed in StackOverflow, issues faced by the developers, and the most significantly discussed APIs. We extracted a sample of 5009 StackOverflow questions, and manually analyzed 1000 posts of Android-related energy questions. Our study shows that developers are most concerned about energy-related issues that concern improper implementations, sensor, and radio utilization.