My third android application grew out of the frustration for not knowing what is going on with device behind my back. Many of the early apps - probably written on the emulator or with little field test and experience on real devices are pretty aggressive in resource usage - some of them in the background. From my own experience with Android programming, it can be pretty hard sometimes not to mess up and do something which is very power-consuming merely by accident. Mobile programming requires a particular style and attention to resource efficiency, which many programmers from a desktop/server background are not used to. NetMeter makes use of data from the /proc filesystem of the linux kernel which is deep underneath the Android platform. As opposed to using supported and documented APIs this is quite a bit more hacky and uncertain to work on any device or even future releases. On the other hand, the /proc filesystem is a pretty standard mechanism for making kernel state accessible to u