Ken Kawamoto Releases Power Struggle, A Two-Player Game Fought Over Phone Charge
The game turns USB Power Delivery's role-swapping into a losing proposition for both players, since the charge that moves between the two phones is smaller than what the app itself burns.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Ken Kawamoto released Power Struggle on October 4. It is a two-player tap game for Android phones joined by a USB-C cable. The side that taps more draws power while the other side's battery drops. Kawamoto says the winning side pulls about 1500mA and the receiving side takes in only about 400mA, with the 1100mA gap likely lost to the game's processing.
Playing it needs more than two phones and a cable. Swapping the power-supplying role calls for permissions Android does not hand to ordinary apps, so players install Shizuku to run the system command dumpsys usb set-port-roles. The phone running Shizuku becomes the host and sends data to the other over Android Open Accessory mode.
Kawamoto is a staff software engineer at Google and has built hardware-and-software experiments before, among them tempescope, which reproduces weather inside a box. Power Struggle is published on GitHub, and his own account of the power draw suggests a mobile battery is the better answer.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.