abstract = "Mobile applications can be very network-intensive.
Mobile phone users are often on limited data plans,
while network infrastructure has limited capacity.
There is little work on optimising network usage of
mobile applications. The most popular approach has been
prefetching and caching assets. However, past work has
shown that developers can improve the network usage of
Android applications by making changes to Java source
code. We built upon this insight and investigated the
effectiveness of automated, heuristic application of
software patches, a technique known as Genetic
Improvement (GI), to improve network usage. Genetic
improvement has already shown effective at reducing the
execution time and memory usage of Android
applications. We thus adapt our existing GIdroid
framework with a new mutation operator and develop a
new profiler to identify network-intensive methods to
target. Unfortunately, our approach is unable to find
improvements. We conjecture this is due to the fact
source code changes affecting network might be rare in
the large patch search space. We thus advocate use of
more intelligent search strategies in future work.",