How to test the battery app usage of Mobile

In this blog, we will see how to measure and test the mobile app battery usage. Nowadays battery life is a bigger headache for mobile users and everybody wants to extend their phone’s battery life. users expect better battery life more than camera, processor and storage.  For example, the Nokia 3310 phone only had a battery capacity of 900 mAh, In comparison, the Apple iPhone 7 has a 1960 mAh lithium-ion battery and the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge has an even bigger 3600 mAh battery. But even with such big batteries, phones can only last for a maximum of a couple of days. And more often than not, our phones need to be charged everyday or even a few times a day.

There’s an interesting race going on right now. From one side, mobile chipsets are becoming more energy efficient. But on the other hand, apps are becoming more demanding in terms of processing power and we see a growing trend not only in the amount of data used by mobile devices but in the speed of connections as well. As bigger batteries pose bigger threats of an explosion, software developers should be working really hard to conserve as much power as possible in their apps. And we can help with that!

How can you measure battery usage?

1. There is a simple way to analyse and measure battery usage on mobile devices. go for device settings, and tap battery, it displays the battery usage of the each and every app that you have installed.

2. Another method is to install freely available apps in the store(eg, Battery Doctor) that measure and save the battery usage.

3. Another way to measure the battery usage to attaching the phone to a special measuring device or equipment that can read and measure the battery in the real time.

How an application consume more battery?

Check with yourself with these questions.

• Whether your app handles large amounts of data(Example: Export/import large amount of file such as photo/documents/video.?
• Whether your app handle live streaming?
• Whether your app use a large amount of mobile data?
• Whether your applications check for location frequently?
• Whether your app sync between user and server?
• Whether your app send analytic data from your app to 3rd party(Example: Google Analytics)
• Whether app runs a more background data?

How to Perform Battery Testing?

Battery testing is something you’ll need to do in a methodical way. While every application is different, we’ve come up with an example of a mobile app testing workflow.

Set your app up for test(get ready to download/export/stream,, etc)

•     Note your current battery stats (overall percentage, the percentage used by your app currently, etc).

How to test a mobile app battery usage?

• Start the test
• Note down the current battery stats and keep a log of this data for comparison purpose.
• Repeat the testing for any features/functions that could be more problematic
• Repeat this testing with varying levels of overall battery(low/full/half)
• Check whether your app’s other feature are working properly(Example, checking by turn off/on the location services)

When it comes down to testing your app’s battery usage, using different angles of attack is the best approach. Each of these monitoring services we mentioned will help you get a better fix on what you need to improve upon, and with mobile apps, it’s all about efficiency.

At the end of this testing, we would be happy and helps improve our battery life of ur mobile phones, which would be useful to many customers. We will come up with another important topic related to testing in the upcoming weeks.

–
Kumaresan T
Test Engineer,
Mallow Technologies