Why mobile eco-design is essential in 2025?
In the face of the climate crisis, the digital world can no longer be an exception.
Today, mobile applications are deeply embedded in our daily lives, and their environmental footprint continues to grow. Yet, it is possible to take action, starting at the design stage.
Mobile eco-design is a responsible development approach aimed at minimizing the ecological impact of applications. This practice is part of the broader Green IT movement, which considers the entire lifecycle of digital technologies—from data centers to hardware recycling.
While Green IT primarily focuses on infrastructure, eco-design targets the code itself: functional simplicity, resource optimization, and thoughtful compatibility are just a few ways to make apps more sustainable—and often, more efficient.
So how can you design a mobile application that’s useful, smooth… and eco-friendly? Here are our key steps to help you take action.
Mobile eco-design: a concrete response to the environmental challenges of digital technology
Mobile eco-design: a way to reduce digital impact and boost performance
In France, the digital sector accounts for nearly 10% of electricity consumption and 2.5% of national greenhouse gas emissions, according to a joint study by ADEME and Arcep. This trend is on the rise, driven by the explosion of digital usage and the growing number of connected devices.
In light of this, interest in more responsible practices is increasing—among both developers and client companies.
Beyond the environmental impact, software eco-design also brings tangible secondary benefits: improved performance, reduced loading times, and a better user experience.
Barriers to mobile eco-design: between innovation, performance, and real-world constraints
Mobile eco-design is built on a logic of compromise. Integrating innovative technologies—like artificial intelligence, for instance—can significantly increase an app’s size and resource consumption, which runs counter to the principles of digital frugality.
For many clients, innovation still takes precedence over reducing environmental impact. The pursuit of efficiency may therefore slow down the development of features that are seen as attractive or distinctive to the end user.
Another major structural barrier is the rebound effect. This phenomenon refers to how the efficiency gains from a more streamlined design are often canceled out—or even exceeded—by increased usage. The growing power of devices, faster connectivity, and rising user expectations all drive the integration of more complex, resource-intensive services (heavy content, AI processing, etc.). As a result, even with a better-optimized interface, the overall environmental impact can continue to grow.
Eco-design, therefore, cannot be approached in isolation. It must be part of a broader strategy that combines technical optimization with a critical reflection on usage, to prevent progress from being erased by technological acceleration.
Mobile eco-design: a holistic approach at every stage of the lifecycle
Eco-design goes beyond a few isolated optimizations. It’s a systemic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of a digital service—from initial conception to long-term maintenance—with the goal of reducing environmental impact at every step.
Here are a few practical levers specific to mobile development:
- Adopt an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach: Developing a first version focused only on essential features helps minimize the app’s size from the start. By relying on user feedback to evolve the product, we avoid adding unnecessary or energy-hungry features.
- Evaluate the real usefulness of each feature: From the initial project planning stage, questioning the relevance of each component helps eliminate the superfluous. For example, an animated carousel on the homepage may be omitted if it doesn’t provide functional value. During maintenance, removing underused features lightens the interface, simplifies the code, and reduces data exchanges.
- Optimize code from the development phase: Inefficient instructions can generate a high number of unnecessary requests. For instance, a loop querying the database each time it runs can often be replaced with a single, well-structured query. These optimizations, though often invisible to users, directly impact energy consumption.
- Limit the frequency of updates: Every mobile update requires a potentially large download. By spacing out releases and grouping fixes and new features, we reduce data transfer volumes.
Finally, eco-design doesn’t apply uniformly. Each layer of the service—backend, web, and mobile—offers its own opportunities for improvement. On the backend, this might involve streamlining databases or choosing more energy-efficient infrastructure. On the web, efforts can focus on reducing page weight, compressing images, and limiting the use of external scripts. On mobile, the priority remains reducing battery usage and data consumption—two key challenges in building apps that are both high-performing and environmentally responsible.
5 best practices to reduce energy consumption on mobile
These general principles lay the groundwork for a responsible approach—but how can they be translated into real-world mobile app development? Here are five concrete action points to integrate eco-design at the heart of your projects, while balancing performance, efficiency, and user experience.
#1 Design with frugality in mind
Designing a frugal app means making technical and functional choices that lower energy consumption without compromising the user experience.
Enable Dark mode
On OLED screens, black pixels are essentially turned off, significantly reducing energy consumption. Including a dark mode in your apps is therefore an effective way to improve device battery life.
Disable or simplify non-essential animations
Common interactions (tap, scroll, refresh) don’t require complex animations. Visual effects like parallax scrolling, 3D transitions, or blur effects put a heavy load on the GPU and can weigh down the user experience. These can be replaced with lighter transitions (e.g., simple fades, linear slides) or with the native animations of iOS and Android, which are already performance-optimized. Limiting the number of simultaneously animated elements also helps avoid unnecessary graphical overload.
Limit the use of energy-intensive components
Some components—such as the flashlight, vibration motor, or geolocation—consume a significant amount of energy. They should only be used when truly necessary. For geolocation, it's recommended to adjust:
- Precision (use balanced mode instead of high accuracy),
- Frequency (trigger location updates occasionally rather than continuously).
Mobile operating systems provide suitable tools: on iOS, the LocationButton lets users share their location only when needed. On Android, a one-time permission (“Allow only this time”) can serve the same purpose. These options help preserve battery life while also improving privacy.
Avoid excessive client-side logging
An overload of logs can saturate memory, slow down the app, and trigger unnecessary data exchanges with servers. It’s best to limit logging to critical events that are genuinely useful for monitoring purposes.
#2 Monitor and analyze the app’s energy consumption
Monitoring is a key step in identifying energy waste and guiding eco-design efforts.
Track resources in real time
Monitoring CPU usage (Central Processing Unit), memory, disk, and network activity helps detect inefficiencies early. These metrics are often accessible directly through the IDE during app compilation and testing.
Detect abnormal consumption spikes
By correlating spikes in resource usage with recent updates or newly added features, it's possible to pinpoint causes and adjust the code or app behavior accordingly.
Analyse code with dedicates tools
Tools like Creedengo (formerly ecoCode), a plugin for SonarQube, enable static analysis of source code to automatically detect quality issues that may have an ecological impact.
#3 Intelligent adapt app behavior
An eco-designed mobile application should adjust in real time to the user’s context. This adaptability helps preserve device resources without degrading the user experience.
Respond to power-saving modes
When the system detects that power-saving mode is enabled, the app can adjust its behavior by reducing sync frequency, disabling certain animations, or pausing non-essential background tasks.
Implement an effective caching system
Temporarily storing previously accessed data reduces server requests, cuts down on data transfers, and eases network usage. In addition to energy savings, this improves app responsiveness and makes it more resilient in cases of poor or no connectivity.
#4 Ensure compatbility without abandoning older versions
Eco-design should not mean exclusion. A responsible application considers users with older devices, while maintaining good performance and a reduced footprint.
Define a relevant minimum OS version
Choose an Android or iOS version that is recent enough to ensure security and performance, without forcing users to upgrade their devices. This approach balances digital sobriety with inclusion.
Dynamically adapt functionalities
Through conditional code, certain features are only enabled on newer systems, while still offering a functional experience for others. This prevents restricting access to the entire app on older devices, while leveraging optimizations where available.
#5 Optimize the use of external resources and media
External resources (images, videos, fonts, or third-party libraries) often make up a significant portion of a mobile app’s size and energy consumption. Optimizing them directly helps reduce the app’s carbon footprint, improve performance, and limit bandwidth usage.
- Intelligently compress images: Choose appropriate formats and apply lossless compression when possible.
- Streamline the use of fonts and icons: Include only what's truly necessary and consider using vector icons to reduce the app's weight.
- Implement lazy loading: Load media and components only when they are actually visible or needed by the user, to avoid unnecessary requests and processing.
- Limit third-party libraries: Every library adds its own CPU load, network requests, or embedded media. Always assess their usefulness, and opt for native or lighter alternatives when possible.
Conclusion
Mobile eco-design is built on a collection of best practices that are often simple to implement, yet have a significant impact when applied at scale. Each optimization—no matter how small it may seem—becomes a powerful lever when used in an app accessed by thousands or even millions of users.
But beyond reducing environmental impact, eco-design creates a virtuous cycle: lighter apps, faster performance, greater privacy respect—and ultimately, a more enjoyable user experience. Energy efficiency and user excellence are not in conflict; they reinforce one another.
Adopting this approach means choosing to build applications that are not only high-performing, but also responsible and sustainable.
