GREEN TOOLS for Flutter Mobile Development

Android Studio Profile

Description: Built into Android Studio, the Android Profiler provides real-time data on CPU, memory, network, and battery usage of your app.

How to Use?

Open your project in Android Studio.

Run your app on an emulator or a physical device.

Navigate to “View” > “Tool Windows” > “Profiler

Monitor thread activity, function calls, and execution times.

Track power consumption related to CPU, network, and other system components.

Make necessary code and design changes to improve app performance and reduce energy consumption.

It is highly recommended to perform test on physical mobile device.

Measurements

Energy Consumption:

CPU Usage: Monitor how much the app utilizes the device's processor, helping to identify and optimize heavy CPU tasks.

Battery Drain: Measure how the app affects battery life, focusing on high-consumption activities.

Component-Specific Usage: Assess energy consumption of specific components like the screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, and sensors.

Data Usage:

Network Traffic: Monitor the volume of data sent and received over cellular and Wi-Fi connections.

Data Efficiency: Evaluate the app's data usage that can be used to minimize unnecessary data transfers, reducing network load and energy consumption.

Performance Metrics:

App Load Time: Measure the time taken for the app to load and become responsive, helping to optimize startup performance.

Response Time: Evaluate the app’s responsiveness to user inputs to ensure a smooth user experience.

Resource Utilization: Track the usage of memory and other resources during app operation to identify and address performance bottlenecks.

Green Spector

Description: Greenspector offers a solution to assess the energy consumption and environmental impact of mobile applications and websites. This solution takes software to review as input and provides results in the form of raw measures of energy and data, a grade, and an estimation of environmental impacts regarding a set of planetary limits.

How to Use?

Register your account on Greenspector

Write scripts in GDSL (Green spector Domain Specific Langauge) to automate user journeys that replicate user behaviour. These journeys include actions such as launching the app, navigating through screens, and performing specific tasks.

Use Greenspector CLI to execute your GDSL scripts on virtual devices

Greenspector Studio aggregates the performance metrics into an Ecoscore, which combines energy consumption, data usage, and user journey duration.

Use the Ecoscore as a quality gate in your CI/CD pipeline to ensure that any new code changes do not negatively impact the app's environmental performance.

Make necessary code and design changes to optimize the app's performance, reducing its environmental impact.

Carbon Measurement

Greenspector measures the energy consumed by your mobile application during various user journeys, including both active usage and background processes by applying LCA methodologies to estimate the broader environmental impacts associated with the use of digital services.

Measurements

Energy Consumption:

Battery Drain Measurement: Greenspector evaluates the app's energy consumption by monitoring the battery usage during various user journeys. This includes measuring battery drain per hour and identifying energy-intensive operations.

Background Process Monitoring: It tracks energy consumption of background processes and compares it to baseline measurements, helping identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary background activities.

CPU Optimization

CPU Usage Monitoring: Greenspector provides detailed insights into CPU usage, allowing developers to track the percentage of CPU capacity used during active app sessions.

Spike Detection: It can detect and report high CPU usage spikes, providing data to help reduce these instances through code optimization and efficient task management.

Memory Optimization

Memory Usage Tracking: Greenspector monitors the app’s memory usage in real-time, helping to ensure that it stays within the specified threshold.

Leak Detection: The tool can detect memory leaks by analyzing memory usage patterns over extended periods, ensuring that memory consumption remains stable.

Network Efficiency

Network Traffic Analysis: Greenspector measures the volume of network requests and data transfer rates, providing insights into how to reduce unnecessary network traffic through caching and optimization.

Data Transfer Efficiency: It can evaluate the effectiveness of data compression techniques by monitoring the size of data payloads before and after compression.

Flutter Dev Tools

Description: Flutter DevTools is a suite of performance and debugging tools for Flutter and Dart applications. It provides a wide range of features to help developers diagnose and optimize their apps for better performance, energy efficiency, and overall quality.

Launching Dev Tools

DevTools can be launched from the command line or integrated within your IDE (such as Visual Studio Code or Android Studio). Here are detailed instructions on how you can launch the tool

Prerequisites

Flutter SDK: Ensure you have Flutter installed. You can check by running flutter –version in your terminal. IDE: Use either Visual Studio Code or Android Studio with Flutter and Dart plugins installed. Device or Emulator: Have a device connected or an emulator running.

Launching Flutter DevTools Using Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

1-Install Flutter and Dart Plugins:

Unordered List ItemGo to the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X).

Unordered List ItemSearch for Flutter and Dart and install both plugins.

2-Open your Flutter project:

Unordered List ItemOpen your Flutter project in VS Code.

3-Start Debugging:

Unordered List ItemPress F5 or go to the Debug view (Ctrl+Shift+D) and click on “Run”.

4-Open DevTools:

Unordered List ItemOnce the app is running, you will see a notification in the bottom right corner saying “Dart DevTools is available”.

Unordered List ItemClick on “Open DevTools”.

Alternatively, you can open DevTools from the command palette:

Unordered List ItemPress Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command palette.

Unordered List ItemType Open DevTools and select the corresponding option.

Using Android Studio

1-Install Flutter and Dart Plugins:

Unordered List ItemGo to File > Settings (or Preferences on macOS) > Plugins.

Unordered List ItemSearch for Flutter and Dart plugins and install them.

2-Open your Flutter project:

Unordered List ItemOpen your Flutter project in Android Studio.

3-Start Debugging:

Unordered List ItemClick on the green play button in the toolbar or select Run > Run 'main.dart'.

4-Open DevTools:

Unordered List ItemOnce the app is running, you will see an icon in the toolbar labeled Flutter Inspector. Click on it.

Unordered List ItemIn the Flutter Inspector tab, click on the Open DevTools button.

Using Terminal

1-Run your Flutter app:

Unordered List ItemNavigate to your Flutter project directory in the terminal.

Unordered List ItemRun flutter run to start your app.

2-Open DevTools:

Unordered List ItemIn a separate terminal window, run flutter pub global activate devtools to ensure DevTools is installed.

Unordered List ItemThen run flutter pub global run devtools to start the DevTools server.

Unordered List ItemOpen a web browser and navigate to the URL provided in the terminal (usually http://127.0.0.1:9100).

Video to understand dev tool and how to interpret results :https://youtu.be/_EYk-E29edo?si=jxWA08iRKVHWwvhi

Measurements

Energy Efficiency:

Performance Profiling: Identify energy-intensive operations that can be optimized for better performance.

CPU Profiler: Detects and optimizes high CPU usage spikes that can be reduced which lowers the overall power consumption, making the app more energy-efficient.

Background Processes: Use DevTools to monitor background processes and minimize unnecessary background activity, which can drain the battery

CPU Optimization

CPU Usage Analysis: Use the CPU Profiler to analyze the CPU usage of different parts of your app. After identifying these parts which consume a high percentage of CPU resources, we can prevent excessive energy consumption.

Isolate High CPU Tasks: Detect CPU-intensive tasks that can be considered to run in isolation to prevent blocking the main thread and to distribute the load efficiently.

Memory Optimization:

Memory Profiler: Monitor memory allocations and usage patterns. Detects memory leaks and unnecessary memory allocations, which are helpful in efficient memory management. Reducing memory usage helps in lowering the energy required for garbage collection and overall app operations.

Network Efficiency:

Network Profiling: Track network requests and data transfer patterns. Using this information one can optimize network calls by implementing effective caching and reducing the frequency of network requests. Efficient network usage reduces the energy consumed during data transfer.

UI Performance: Frame Rendering Analysis: Use the performance tab to analyze frame rendering times. Using this information one can make sure that the UI thread usage does not exceed 16 ms per frame for more than 5% of frames to maintain a smooth user experience and reduce energy consumption.