Battery Drainer: A Unique Approach to Energy Efficiency
Battery Drainer is an Android app developed by S2 Research Group. This free app is designed to drain your phone's battery as quickly as possible. At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive, but the app has a deeper purpose.
The main objective of Battery Drainer is to showcase the importance of energy-efficient software and sustainable software engineering practices in battery-powered devices, such as phones and tablets. By simulating heavy usage of various hardware components, the app demonstrates the need for optimizing power consumption in order to reduce the overall energy demand of IT systems.
The app utilizes several hardware features to drain the battery, including CPU, GPU, camera, hardware sensors, network, and GPS chip. It runs threads performing expensive computations, uses OpenGL ES 2.0 to draw thousands of small rotating pyramids, utilizes the CameraX API, samples all available sensors at the highest possible rate, downloads large files repeatedly over the network, and utilizes precise location accuracy through the GPS chip.
Battery Drainer addresses the growing concern of energy consumption in the IT industry. With IT systems already consuming 10% of global electricity as of 2022, and an estimated 1/3 of global energy demand attributed to the Internet, data centers, telecommunication, and embedded devices by 2030, the app highlights the importance of green IT and sustainable software engineering practices.
For those interested, the source code for Battery Drainer is publicly available on the S2 Research Group's GitHub page under the MIT License.
