Motivated by mobile devices’ growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an account of how data demand has meaning and utility in our participants’ social practices, and the timing and relative impacts of these. We then assess the scale of this demand by drawing comparison between our fine-grained observations and a more representative dataset of 398 devices from the Device Analyzer corpus. Our results highlight the significant categories of data demanding practice, and the identification of where changes in app time and duration of use might reduce or shift demand to reduce services’ impacts.
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