Investigating Decreasing Energy Usage in Mobile Apps via Indistinguishable Color Changes

Changing UI colors is an effective approach for reducing app energyusage for devices with OLED displays. Unfortunately, even when care istaken to ensure that visual properties of the (UI) are maintained (e.g., contrast ratios between text and background elements), suchchanges often compromise the aesthetics of the application. In thispaper, we investigate whether indistinguishable changes, changes thatare less likely to compromise UI aesthetics, can also result insignificant energy savings. To answer this question, we performed anempirical study of 10 Android applications. The results of the studyare promising as they demonstrate that, in most cases, the changes areacceptable to users and still result in modest reductions in energy usage.