Developed by researchers from the university, in conjunction with Intel and startup company Mobile Enerlytics, Hush intelligently stops apps that run in the background while your Android smartphone is in sleep mode. In short, this new tool prioritizes the apps you use the most and prevents apps that you rarely use from drastically affecting battery life.
“During screen-off, the phone hardware should enter the sleep state, draining close to zero power,” said Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering Charlie Hu. “Apps wake the phone up periodically during screen-off to do useful things, but then afterward, they should let the phone go back to sleep. They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because of software bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android power control application programming interfaces called wakelocks.”
Wakelocks exist as power-saving software mechanisms should only briefly awaken your phone, permitting you to maximize battery life. Unfortunately, there are a good deal of poorly coded and even malicious apps that creates an excessive number of wakelocks, resulting in hits to battery life. This is what these researchers want to remedy with Hush, which was found to have saved around 16 percent of a phone’s battery life during sleep mode.
That may not seem like that substantial of a boost, but given the relative stagnation of battery technology advances, Hush seems like a step in the right direction. If you want to give Hush a shot, you can do so through its Github page, though it may take some time before you can download it through the Google Play Store.
