Android, a platform for smartphones and mobile devices, is becoming more and more present in the market. Nevertheless, the battery runtime of smartphones is short and strongly influenced by the network usage. Some proposals exist to reduce the energy consumption associated to the network usage and increase the smartphone runtime. But for adjusting them for a real improvement it is required to study the network utilisation triggered by the smartphone applications. With this analysis the applications communication patterns can be obtained and used to predict the network usage and the amount of data expected.

In order to gather network statistics of the running applications, a logger application is implemented for the Android platform to log network statistics of running applications. The statistics are analysed on a PC computer to obtain the applications' communication patterns. A number of applications are selected, sorted by the rankings of downloads and type. A detailed analysis of the network usage is presented. This analysis identifies some of their patterns, some application characteristics and groups of applications from the determined network usage. The network usages for applications with similar functionalities are compared and lessons learnt from the analysis are discussed. Finally, some improvements for our logger application and analysis are discussed.