Ingress APK Teardown [1.73.1]

Welcome back to another Ingress teardown. This is version 1.73.1, which is currently on a 1% roll out to a Play Store near you. Assuming no errors, it’ll reach the entire Ingress population within 72 hours.

Languages on Languages

As first mentioned in 1.72.0 a large effort to remove all hard coded strings began. For those who might not know, hard coding is placing strings directly into the source of the application. This means that Android and its powerful localization system cannot translate any string that is hard coded. Now, we have quite the list of strings present (Around 1000). The last version proved that translation was under way and Japanese is the first language to join English in the brand new translation system.

You will see a new menu under Settings labelled “Language”

This has 3 options

• Auto – Select Language via selection on Android device with fall back to English
• English – English
• 日本語 – Japanese

This list will probably grow in the next few releases.

Wearables

This version added the “ActiveMode” service. For those unfamiliar with an Android Service, here is a blip from the documentation.

A Service is an application component representing either an application’s desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use. Each service class must have a corresponding <service> declaration in its package’s AndroidManifest.xml.

We now have the AndroidManifest declaration

<service android:exported="false" android:name=".smartnotifications.ActiveModeService"/>

This shows this feature is nearing the end of development, since the connection between the host (Android) and code (Ingress) has been made. Let me remind you that this feature is still ONLY enabled for those who have an email address ending in @google.com (in addition, I believe, to a server side flag).

This in addition to a handshake change shows that perfecting of this feature is still ongoing.

From the above diff report you can see they changed “amNearbyPortalDistanceM” from 40 to 200 meters. This is a hunch, but it looks like you used to get notifications from portals within 40m (which is in range of your hacking circle). Now this limit is 200m. Is this change for testing or permanent? We will monitor this number and update any changes that happen to it.

Portal Layouts

After the uproar occurred in the Ingress community regarding the placement of the HACK button. We knew changes would be coming. I’m not sure if this is the solution at hand or a temporary fix, but all the buttons have shifted locations. See the below screen shot of the previous version and 1.73.1. As you can see, the buttons have less padding between them and have grown in height. This should make it slightly easier to hit the HACK button with one hand.

Conclusion

This apk was built on March 20 and reached us on March 23. While the teardown seems small, this version was no easy task to complete. Language abstracting ~1,000 strings is tedious and boring, but in the end benefited those who wish to use the scanner in a non English language.

We will be back with 1.74.x.