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\section{Value Measure Inputs}
\label{sec-measure}
To continue we discuss possible inputs to a value measure and how to collect
them at runtime. In each case, we also discuss how such statistics could be
misleading.
\subsection{Overall Usage}
There are a variety of different ways to measure overall app usage that could
be useful inputs to our value measure. Total foreground time is
straightforward to measure, particularly on today's smartphones where one app
tends to dominate the display. However, next-generation smartphone platforms
that provide multiple apps with simultaneous access to the display will
complicate this task by making it more difficult to determine which app the
user is paying attention to. Number of starts is also a potentially-useful
input, as may be the distribution of interaction times across all times that
the app was brought to the foreground.
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\sloppypar{While these measures of contact time are intuitive, there are obvious cases
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in which they fail, particularly for apps that spend a great deal of time
running in the background in order to deliver a small amount of useful
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foreground information---such as a pedometer app.}
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\subsection{User Interface Statistics}
Patterns of interaction may also be useful to observe, and inputs such as
keystrokes and touchscreen events are simple to track. However, there is more
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obvious differentiation between app interaction patterns between
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categories---users deliver far more keystrokes to a chat client than to a
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video player---so interaction statistics will have to be used in conjunction
with complementary value measure components that offset the differences
between high-interaction and low-interaction apps. This approach also fails
in the case where apps deploy confusing or unnecessary interfaces that
require a great deal of unnecessary interaction to accomplish simple tasks.
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Clearly, such apps should not be rewarded.
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\subsection{Notification Click-Through Rates}
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Another interesting statistic that could provide insight on app value is how
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often users view or click through app notifications. When notifications are
delivered but not viewed, then it is unclear whether the app needed to
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deliver them. When clickable notifications---such as those for new
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email---provide a way for users to immediately launch the app, the percentage
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of notifications that are clicked versus ignored could be used to at least
evaluate how effective the notifications are, and may also reflect on overall
app value.
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Notification view and click-through rates also help put into context the
energy used by apps when they are running in the background. Legitimate
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background energy consumption should be for one of two purposes: (1) to
prepare the app to deliver more value the next time it is foregrounded, as is
the case when music players download songs and store them locally to reduce
their runtime networking usage; or (2) to deliver realtime notifications to
the user. The effectiveness of background energy consumption to fill caches
will be reflected in the apps overall energy usage, since retrieving local
content is more energy efficient than using the network. Effectiveness of
background consumption to deliver notifications may be reflected in the rate
at which notifications are viewed or clicked, since a notification that is
not consumed did not need to be retrieved.
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However, in some cases apps may do an effective job at summarizing the event
within the notification itself, providing no need for the user to bring the
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app to the foreground. Clearly, such apps should not be penalized.
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\subsection{Content Delivery}
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Another approach to measuring value that we feel is promising is to consider
apps as content delivery agents and measure how efficiently they deliver
information to and from the user. Encouragingly, multiple apps that we have
previously considered can fit into this framework:
\begin{itemize}
\item \textbf{Chat client:} the content is the messages exchanged by users,
and efficiency is determined by the amount of screen time and interaction
required to retrieve and render incoming messages and generate outgoing
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messages as replies. Value is measured by the content of the messages.
Efficient chat clients exchange many messages per joule.
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\item \textbf{Video player:} the content is the video delivered to the user
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and efficiency is determined by the amount of network bandwidth and
processing needed to retrieve and render the video. Value is measured by the
information delivered by the videos and efficient video players present a
large amount of video content to their users per joule.
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\item \textbf{Pedometer:} the content is the count of the number of steps
presented to the user and efficiency is determined by the accelerometer rate
and any post-processing required to produce an accurate estimate. Value is
measured as the ability to maintain the step count and efficient pedometers
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can achieve more accuracy in computing values per joule.
%can compute accurate values while consuming small amounts of energy.
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\end{itemize}
However, while this framework is conceptually appealing, fitting each app
into it requires app-specific features that we are trying to avoid: content
is measured in messages for the chat client, frames for the video player, and
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the step value accuracy for the pedometer. This raises the question of
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whether a single measure of content delivery requiring no app-specific
knowledge can be utilized in all cases. We explore this question in more
detail, as well as differences between the other value measure inputs we have
discussed, through the experiment and results described next.
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