research-article

Understanding the Characteristics of Android Wear OS

Authors:

Felix Xiaozhu LinAuthors Info & Claims

MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Pages 151 - 164

https://doi.org/10.1145/2906388.2906398

Published: 20 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Interactive wearable devices bring dramatic changes to apps and hardware, leaving operating system (OS) design in the mist. To this end, we thoroughly examine the execution efficiency of Android Wear, a popular wearable OS. By running a suite of fifteen benchmarks, we profile four system aspects: CPU usage, idle episodes, thread-level parallelism, and microarchitectural behaviors. We present the discovered inefficiencies and their root causes, together with a series of widespread, yet unknown OS design flaws. Towards designing future wearable OSes, our study has yielded a generic lesson, key insights, and specific action items.

References

[1]

Anandtech. The apple watch review. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9381/the-apple-watch-review, 2015.

[2]

Apple. Apple watch human interface guidelines. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/WatchHumanInterfaceGuidelines/, 2015.

[3]

ARM. ARM architecture reference manual, armv7-a and armv7-r edition, 2014.

[4]

Blake, G., Dreslinski, R. G., Mudge, T., and Flautner, K. Evolution of thread-level parallelism in desktop applications. In Proc. Int. Symp. Computer Architecture (ISCA) (New York, NY, USA, 2010), ISCA '10, ACM, pp. 302--313.

Digital Library

[5]

Blem, E., Menon, J., and Sankaralingam, K. Power struggles: Revisiting the risc vs. cisc debate on contemporary arm and x86 architectures. In High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA2013), 2013 IEEE 19th International Symposium on (Feb 2013), pp. 1--12.

Digital Library

[6]

Business Insider. The first round of apple watch apps weren't that great, but that's all about to change. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-first-apple-watch-apps-are-slow-2015--6, 2015.

[7]

BusinessInsider. Apple just kneecapped google's smartwatch efforts, 2015.

[8]

Carroll, A., and Heiser, G. The systems hacker's guide to the galaxy energy usage in a modern smartphone. In Proceedings of the 4th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2013), APSys '13, ACM, pp. 5:1--5:7.

Digital Library

[9]

Carroll, A., and Heiser, G. Mobile multicores: Use them or waste them. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 48, 1 (May 2014), 44--48.

Digital Library

[10]

Connolly, E., Faaborg, A., Raffle, H., and Ryskamp, B. Designing for wearables. Google I/O, 2014.

[11]

Cornelius, C., Peterson, R., Skinner, J., Halter, R., and Kotz, D. A wearable system that knows who wears it. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2014), MobiSys '14, ACM, pp. 55--67.

Digital Library

[12]

Endo, Y., Wang, Z., Chen, J. B., and Seltzer, M. Using latency to evaluate interactive system performance. In Proc. USENIX Conf. Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) (New York, NY, USA, 1996), OSDI '96, ACM, pp. 185--199.

Digital Library

[13]

Esmaeilzadeh, H., Blem, E., St. Amant, R., Sankaralingam, K., and Burger, D. Dark silicon and the end of multicore scaling. In Proc. Int. Symp. Computer Architecture (ISCA) (New York, NY, USA, 2011), ISCA '11, ACM, pp. 365--376.

Digital Library

[14]

Ferdman, M., Adileh, A., Kocberber, O., Volos, S., Alisafaee, M., Jevdjic, D., Kaynak, C., Popescu, A. D., Ailamaki, A., and Falsafi, B. Clearing the clouds: A study of emerging scale-out workloads on modern hardware. In Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages & Operating Systems (ASPLOS) (New York, NY, USA, 2012), ASPLOS XVII, ACM, pp. 37--48.

Digital Library

[15]

Flautner, K., Uhlig, R., Reinhardt, S., and Mudge, T. Thread-level parallelism and interactive performance of desktop applications. In Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages & Operating Systems (ASPLOS) (New York, NY, USA, 2000), ASPLOS IX, ACM, pp. 129--138.

Digital Library

[16]

Gao, C., Gutierrez, A., Rajan, M., Dreslinski, R., Mudge, T., and Wu, C. A study of mobile device utilization. In IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (2015).

[17]

Google. Ui patterns for android wear. https://developer.android.com/design/wear/patterns.html, 2014.

[18]

Google Inc. Binder. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Binder.html.

[19]

Google Inc. Systrace. http://developer.android.com/tools/help/systrace.html.

[20]

Google Inc. Wakelock. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/PowerManager.WakeLock.html.

[21]

Gutierrez, A., Dreslinski, R., Wenisch, T., Mudge, T., Saidi, A., Emmons, C., and Paver, N. Full-system analysis and characterization of interactive smartphone applications. In Workload Characterization (IISWC), 2011 IEEE International Symposium on (Nov 2011), pp. 81--90.

Digital Library

[22]

Ha, K., Chen, Z., Hu, W., Richter, W., Pillai, P., and Satyanarayanan, M. Towards wearable cognitive assistance. In Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, & Services (MobiSys) (New York, NY, USA, 2014), MobiSys '14, ACM, pp. 68--81.

Digital Library

[23]

Harter, T., Dragga, C., Vaughn, M., Arpaci-Dusseau, A. C., and Arpaci-Dusseau, R. H. A file is not a file: Understanding the i/o behavior of apple desktop applications. In Proc. ACM Symp. Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) (New York, NY, USA, 2011), SOSP '11, ACM, pp. 71--83.

Digital Library

[24]

Hu, G., Yuan, X., Tang, Y., and Yang, J. Efficiently, effectively detecting mobile app bugs with appdoctor. In Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2014), EuroSys '14, ACM, pp. 18:1--18:15.

Digital Library

[25]

Huang, J., Badam, A., Chandra, R., and Nightingale, E. B. Weardrive: Fast and energy-efficient storage for wearables. In 2015 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 15) (Santa Clara, CA, July 2015), USENIX Association, pp. 613--625.

Digital Library

[26]

Huang, Y., Zha, Z., Chen, M., and Zhang, L. Moby: A mobile benchmark suite for architectural simulators. In Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on (March 2014), pp. 45--54.

[27]

Lee, D. C., Crowley, P. J., Baer, J.-L., Anderson, T. E., and Bershad, B. N. Execution characteristics of desktop applications on windows nt. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (Washington, DC, USA, 1998), ISCA '98, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 27--38.

Digital Library

[28]

Lee, K., and Won, Y. Smart layers and dumb result: Io characterization of an android-based smartphone. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Embedded Software (New York, NY, USA, 2012), EMSOFT '12, ACM, pp. 23--32.

Digital Library

[29]

LG USA. Design comes full circle. http://www.lg.com/us/smart-watches/lg-W110-g-watch-r, 2014.

[30]

LiKamWa, R., Wang, Z., Carroll, A., Lin, F. X., and Zhong, L. Draining our glass: An energy and heat characterization of google glass. In Proceedings of 5th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2014), APSys '14, ACM, pp. 10:1--10:7.

Digital Library

[31]

Liu, R., Jiang, L., Jiang, N., and Lin, F. X. Anatomizing system activities on interactive wearable devices. In Proceedings of the 6th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2015), APSys '15, ACM, pp. 18:1--18:7.

Digital Library

[32]

Liu, Y., Xu, C., and Cheung, S.-C. Characterizing and detecting performance bugs for smartphone applications. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (New York, NY, USA, 2014), ICSE 2014, ACM, pp. 1013--1024.

Digital Library

[33]

Lymberopoulos, D., Riva, O., Strauss, K., Mittal, A., and Ntoulas, A. Pocketweb: Instant web browsing for mobile devices. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2012), ASPLOS XVII, ACM, pp. 1--12.

Digital Library

[34]

Ma, X., Huang, P., Jin, X., Wang, P., Park, S., Shen, D., Zhou, Y., Saul, L. K., and Voelker, G. M. edoctor: Automatically diagnosing abnormal battery drain issues on smartphones. In Presented as part of the 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 13) (Lombard, IL, 2013), USENIX, pp. 57--70.

Digital Library

[35]

Mayberry, A., Hu, P., Marlin, B., Salthouse, C., and Ganesan, D. ishadow: Design of a wearable, real-time mobile gaze tracker. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2014), MobiSys '14, ACM, pp. 82--94.

Digital Library

[36]

Miao, H., and Lin, F. X. Tell your graphics stack that the display is circular. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (New York, NY, USA, 2016), HotMobile '16, ACM, pp. 57--62.

Digital Library

[37]

Min, C., Kang, S., Yoo, C., Cha, J., Choi, S., Oh, Y., and Song, J. Exploring current practices for battery use and management of smartwatches. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (New York, NY, USA, 2015), ISWC '15, ACM, pp. 11--18.

Digital Library

[38]

Monsoon. Monsoon power monitor. http://msoon.com/LabEquipment/PowerMonitor.

[39]

Nirjon, S., Gummeson, J., Gelb, D., and Kim, K.-H. Typingring: A wearable ring platform for text input. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2015), MobiSys '15, ACM, pp. 227--239.

Digital Library

[40]

Pandiyan, D., Lee, S.-Y., and Wu, C.-J. Performance, energy characterizations and architectural implications of an emerging mobile platform benchmark suite - mobilebench. In Workload Characterization (IISWC), 2013 IEEE International Symposium on (Sept 2013), pp. 133--142.

[41]

Parate, A., Chiu, M.-C., Chadowitz, C., Ganesan, D., and Kalogerakis, E. Risq: Recognizing smoking gestures with inertial sensors on a wristband. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2014), MobiSys '14, ACM, pp. 149--161.

Digital Library

[42]

Pathak, A., Jindal, A., Hu, Y. C., and Midkiff, S. P. What is keeping my phone awake? Characterizing and detecting no-sleep energy bugs in smartphone apps. In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys) (2012), pp. 267--280.

Digital Library

[43]

Pesterev, A., Zeldovich, N., and Morris, R. T. Locating cache performance bottlenecks using data profiling. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Computer Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2010), EuroSys '10, ACM, pp. 335--348.

Digital Library

[44]

Ravindranath, L., Padhye, J., Agarwal, S., Mahajan, R., Obermiller, I., and Shayandeh, S. Appinsight: Mobile app performance monitoring in the wild. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (Berkeley, CA, USA, 2012), OSDI'12, USENIX Association, pp. 107--120.

Digital Library

[45]

Samsung. Samsun gear application programming guide. http://img-developer.samsung.com/contents/cmm/Samsung_Gear_Application_Programming_Guide_1.0.pdf, 2014.

[46]

Samsung. Samsung gear live. http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/gear/gearlive_design.html, 2014.

[47]

Saxena, Sunil. Tizen architecture overview. Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, 2012.

[48]

Sievers, D., and Duca, N. Chrome on mobile @ 60fps. GPU Technology Conference, 2014.

[49]

Smith, B. C. Procedural reflection in programming languages. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982.

[50]

Techradar. Apple watch battery life: How many hours does it last? http://www.techradar.com/us/news/wearables/apple-watch-battery-life-how-many-hours-does-it-last-1291435, 2015.

[51]

Wang, L., Zhan, J., Luo, C., Zhu, Y., Yang, Q., He, Y., Gao, W., Jia, Z., Shi, Y., Zhang, S., Zheng, C., Lu, G., Zhan, K., Li, X., and Qiu, B. Bigdatabench: A big data benchmark suite from internet services. In High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium on (Feb 2014), pp. 488--499.

[52]

Wei, X., Gomez, L., Neamtiu, I., and Faloutsos, M. Profiledroid: Multi-layer profiling of android applications. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (New York, NY, USA, 2012), Mobicom '12, ACM, pp. 137--148.

Digital Library

[53]

Yan, T., Chu, D., Ganesan, D., Kansal, A., and Liu, J. Fast app launching for mobile devices using predictive user context. In Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, & Services (MobiSys) (New York, NY, USA, 2012), MobiSys'12, ACM, pp. 113--126.

Digital Library

[54]

Yang, T., Liu, T., Berger, E. D., Kaplan, S. F., and Moss, J. E. B. Redline: First class support for interactivity in commodity operating systems. In Proc. USENIX Conf. Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) (Berkeley, CA, USA, 2008), OSDI'08, USENIX Association, pp. 73--86.

Digital Library

[55]

Zhu, Y., and Reddi, V. J. Webcore: Architectural support for mobileweb browsing. In Proceeding of the 41st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecuture (Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2014), ISCA '14, IEEE Press, pp. 541--552.

Digital Library

Cited By

Cardenas LParajes KZhu MZhai S(2024)AutoHealth: Advanced LLM-Empowered Wearable Personalized Medical Butler for Parkinson’s Disease Management2024 IEEE 14th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC)10.1109/CCWC60891.2024.10427622(0375-0379)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCWC60891.2024.10427622
Rohloff AAllen ZLin KOkrend JNie CLiu YTseng H(2021)OpenUVR: an Open-Source System Framework for Untethered Virtual Reality Applications2021 IEEE 27th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00026(223-236)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00026
Ganji AShahzad M(2021)Characterizing the Performance of QUIC on Android and Wear OS Devices2021 International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN52240.2021.9522258(1-11)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN52240.2021.9522258
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Understanding the Characteristics of Android Wear OS

Recommendations

Detecting wearable app permission mismatches: a case study on Android wear
ESEC/FSE 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Wearable devices are becoming increasingly popular. These wearable devices run what is known as wearable apps. Wearable apps are packaged with handheld apps, that must be installed on the accompanying handheld device (e.g., phone).

Given that ...
Mastering Android Wear Application Development
Is the data on your wearable device secure? An Android Wear smartwatch case study

The increasing convergence of wearable technologies and cloud services in applications, such as health care, could result in new attack vectors for the 'Cloud of Things', which could in turn be exploited to exfiltrate sensitive user data. In this paper, ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

June 2016

440 pages

ISBN:9781450342698

DOI:10.1145/2906388

General Chairs:
Rajesh Balan
Singapore Management University
,
Archan Misra
Singapore Management University
,
Program Chairs:
Sharad Agarwal
Microsoft
,
Cecilia Mascolo
University of Cambridge

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing

In-Cooperation

SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 June 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

NSF Award

Conference

MobiSys'16

Sponsor:

SIGMOBILE

MobiSys'16: The 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

June 26 - 30, 2016

Singapore, Singapore

Acceptance Rates

MobiSys '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 197 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

27
Total Citations
View Citations
781
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)48
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 23 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cardenas LParajes KZhu MZhai S(2024)AutoHealth: Advanced LLM-Empowered Wearable Personalized Medical Butler for Parkinson’s Disease Management2024 IEEE 14th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC)10.1109/CCWC60891.2024.10427622(0375-0379)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCWC60891.2024.10427622
Rohloff AAllen ZLin KOkrend JNie CLiu YTseng H(2021)OpenUVR: an Open-Source System Framework for Untethered Virtual Reality Applications2021 IEEE 27th Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00026(223-236)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00026
Ganji AShahzad M(2021)Characterizing the Performance of QUIC on Android and Wear OS Devices2021 International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN52240.2021.9522258(1-11)Online publication date: Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN52240.2021.9522258
Gajaria DAdegbija T(2021)Exploring Domain-Specific Architectures for Energy-Efficient Wearable ComputingJournal of Signal Processing Systems10.1007/s11265-021-01682-y94:6(559-577)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-021-01682-y
Lee JLee UKim H(2020)PASS: Reducing Redundant Notifications between a Smartphone and a Smartwatch for Energy SavingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2019.293050619:11(2656-2669)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2019.2930506
Renz PWicht BRenz PWicht B(2020)Motivation and FundamentalsIntegrated Hybrid Resonant DCDC Converters10.1007/978-3-030-63944-0_2(9-36)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63944-0_2
Guo LZhai SQiao YLin FDan TDahlia M(2019)TranskernelProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358865(675-691)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358865
Hong DNikravesh AMao ZKetkar MKishinevsky MTilevich E(2019)PerfProbeProceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.5555/3340730.3340743(50-61)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3340730.3340743
J. P. Amorim VC. Silva MA. R. Oliveira R(2019)Software and Hardware Requirements and Trade-Offs in Operating Systems for Wearables: A Tool to Improve Devices’ PerformanceSensors10.3390/s1908190419:8(1904)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.3390/s19081904
Zhu XEthan Guo YNikravesh AQian FMao Z(2019)Understanding the Networking Performance ofWear OSACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3376930.337698847:1(91-92)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2019
https://doi.org/10.1145/3376930.3376988
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

EPUB

View this article in ePub.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten