Carat aims to detect energy bugs—app behavior that is consuming energy unnecessarily—using data collected from a community of mobile devices. As featured on TechCrunch, our mobile app generates personalized recommendations for improving battery life and is now available for iOS and Android devices.

Users install and run the Carat app on their mobile phone, tablet, or music player. The app intermittently takes measurements about the device and how it is being used. These measurements are sent to our servers, which perform a statistical analysis. The analysis, a Spark application running on Amazon Web Services, infers how devices are using energy and under what circumstances. After considering a few days worth of data, the personalized results are sent back to users in the form of actionable advice about how to improve their battery life.

Using data from our beta deployments, we have already identified thousands of energy bugs manifesting in the wild. Carat not only detects such misbehavior, but assists diagnosis by correlating with device features like the operating system version and what resources are available (e.g., WiFi or GPS). Some of these bugs caused afflicted users to see battery life that was shorter by hours, even compared to other users of the same app (but where the bug did not trigger). Users were told what misbehavior Carat found on their devices and how to fix it, such as by restarting the app or upgrading the OS.

We are excited to finally be live on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. Please try out the app, leave positive ratings on the respective stores to help us spread the word, and send us any comments or questions. Thank you!