“Smart Storage Survey” App: Identify Android file Usage Patterns

The purpose of this article is to give reader a clear idea about the underline facts of Smart Storage survey. Smart storage is a final year R & D project done by four undergraduate students of computer science and engineering department, University of Moratuwa.

Survey research is one of the most important areas of measurement in applied social research. The broad area of survey research encompasses any measurement procedures that involve asking questions of respondents. A “survey” can be anything form a short paper-and-pencil feedback form to an intensive one-on-one in-depth interview. Nowadays online surveys are more popular.

But unfortunately people are reluctant to participate in surveys. This is mainly because they think that it will harm their privacy or may be it is worthless. If the users are aware of the survey or if there is a transparency they will become more supportive.

From the picture below you can see the usage of smart phones with android operating system. It is pretty much large compared to other operating systems.

Objective of our survey is to shed new light on the file usage patterns and present the data in terms of file size distributions, file sessions, file lifetime, file access activity and read / write access patterns. We characterize different distributions and extract conclusions about usage patterns of Android file systems.

We have developed an android app called ‘Smart Storage : Survey’ to collect data from Android users. This app is available on Play Store. The intention of the app is to log file usage data. The names of the files logged are in encrypted form and the contents of the file are not accessed by the app. So there is no privacy violation of the user.

Further this app will run as a foreground service and it use minimum resources of the phone (average 5 MB when running). Users participated in the survey should run the app for at least a month. The average size of the log file is 150 KB. These log files will be uploaded into central server each day. So around 5 MB will be used for the uploads during the survey time.

Please feel free to contact me for any further clarifications.

Email — anirosh.13@cse.mrt.ac.lk