> It’s like nobody tests these things.What's really happening is perverse incentive structures. Ideally all energy use of every app would be accounted for and, somehow, relayed back to the original "responsible agent" (e.g. a signed app being responsible for all its subprocesses). This then needs to be tied to some valuation.. in an app store, you could say e.g. lower commission based on energy efficiency, or just a higher ranking score.
Currently, resource usage suffers from the tragedy of the commons, and it will remain that way until we fix the incentives.
OSX is starting on that road, as you can see with the Energy tab in activity monitor. I wonder if they will take further steps with it, but it's a good start. (You'd then want e.g. browsers to allow push the accounting down to invidual sites; now we're suddenly attacking death-by-JS as well.)
One day! But until that day, you are right: nobody tests those things. Why would they? Honestly, if you're creating drivers for something, worrying about energy use is... is so inconsequential it's borderline altruistic. Who will ever, really notice? It's basically charity work. That needs to change.