Battery Optimization for Unity

Page on Unity Asset Store, pending approval
When no movement on-screen: Runs efficient 5 FPS
When movement on-screen: Runs a smooth 60+ FPS

Inspiration

There are a ton of popular mobile games made in Unity, but they are notorious for draining a phone's battery even if they spend a lot of time just showing static menus. This also limits Unity's suitability for building non-game apps.

What it does

Target a high FPS when you need it.
Target a low, battery-efficient FPS when you don't.
Well-commented full C# source code.
C# API easy to integrate into existing scripts.
Smart vSync handling respects your Quality Levels.
Smooth transitions between low and high FPS mode.
Great for menu-heavy apps where significant time is spent without much moving on-screen.
Makes Unity a more practical solution for non-game apps.
Supports Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and probably all other platforms Unity can deploy to.

How I built it

Battery Optimization is written in C# on top of Unity's MonoBehaviour.

Challenges I overcame

While seemingly straight-forward, there were a number of challenges in actual implementation:

Handling vSync settings, which can change at run-time in several ways.
Minimizing overhead, it'd be pointless if the Optimizer drains much battery.
Designing the API to be integrated into existing code as quickly, easily, and flexibly as possible.
Assets still have to use an old and buggy version of Unity for backwards compatibility, especially with mobile.

What's next for Battery Optimizer for Unity

Battery Optimizer has been submitted to sell licenses on the Unity Asset Store, pending approval.
Targeting other sources of battery drain besides unnecessary FPS.
For the sake of thousands of phone batteries, I'd love to see this integrated in popular mobile Unity games.