How can I find out how much battery my Android app consumes on user's devices?

Question

I am writing an app to evaluate the feasibility of a Bluetooth P2P network on Android.

I noticed that on a Galaxy Nexus, it uses very little battery, while on a Nexus S, it drains the battery very quickly. This is directly caused by high CPU load due to Bluetooth.

Now, I would like to collect information about how much battery drain my app causes on the devices it is installed upon. Simply logging time vs. battery level is useless since I don't know when the device is in use, and even if I logged that, I would not know if the user is playing 3D games while Torrenting over WiFi or reading an eBook on a dimmed screen.

To make the problem worse, not all battery usage caused by my app is attributed to it in the battery screen - some is listed as "Bluetooth", for example (again, device-dependent).

Is there any easy, privacy-preserving way to get useful information on non-rooted devices? The devices are not under my control. I cannot simply go look in the menu, I cannot use ADB.

Answer 1

The Android API doesn't support this currently. The only available documentation is the one describing how to use BatteryManager's broadcasts, which only supply the overall battery level and no per-application details.

I suppose that even if there are undocumented ways to emulate what the System Settings battery manager shows, they would require rooting.