Indie developer released a game where two smartphones steal charge from each other

On October 4, 2026, developer Ken Kawamoto released Power Struggle, a game for two Android smartphones competing over battery charge. The phones are connected with a USB-C cable, the participants tap the screen quickly, and power flows to whoever taps more often, while the opponent's charge drains. The game is openly published on GitHub.

How the game works

Victory here isn't symbolic. USB-C ports in modern smartphones support the USB Power Delivery standard, which can swap roles: a device that was supplying energy becomes the receiver, and vice versa. Power Struggle switches these roles during the match itself, so current really does flow from the loser to the winner.

Changing roles requires special privileges. The author asks users to install Shizuku, which gives apps the same capabilities as a debug connection, and to run the system command dumpsys usb set-port-roles. The phone running Shizuku passes the game's own data to the opponent as a host via Android Open Accessory.

Who is Ken Kawamoto

Ken Kawamoto works at Google as a software engineer and has long been making unusual things at the intersection of hardware and software. Among his earlier projects are tempescope, which reproduces weather inside a box, and RomoCart, which turns a room into a racing track using Kinect, as well as various playful tools.

The author himself notes in advance that charging this way is unprofitable: the giving phone consumes about 1500 mA, while the receiving one gets only about 400 mA. He suggests attributing the 1100 mA difference to the game's own operation. Still, the scenario is clear: both phones at 5%, neither will make it home, and a single match decides who actually gets there.

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Translation editor: Ловушкин А.