The Impact of Instant Messaging on the Energy Consumption of Android Devices

Context. One of the primary uses of mobile devices is to send and receive instant messages via messaging apps. However, no evidence is still available about how receiving instant messages impacts the energy consumption of mobile devices.Goal. With this study we aim to empirically assess to what extent the number and distribution of received instant messages impact the energy consumption of Android devices.Method. The subjects of our experiment are WhatsApp and Telegram, two of the most known and used messaging apps. Each run of the experiment lasts 5 minutes and is executed on a Nexus 9 Android device. The independent variables of the experiment are: (i) the frequency of the received messages (i.e., 0, 10, 25, 50 per minute) and (ii) the distribution of messages arrival (i.e., evenly or in bursts). The dependent variable of the experiment is the energy consumption of the Android device in Joules.Results. We confirm that the energy consumption of the Android device tends to be proportional with the number of received messages across both apps. When the number of received messages is fixed, the frequency of their arrival does not significantly impact the energy consumption of the Android device.Conclusions. This study provides evidence that receiving instant messages can largely reduce the battery life of a user's Android device, even when the number of received messages is relatively low (i.e., 10 messages per minute). Moreover, sending bursts of messages does not lead to significant changes in terms of energy consumption. Developers can use this information to develop new features for their Instant Messaging apps for aggressively bundling messages without the risk of impacting the energy consumption of end users' devices.