Ingress APK Teardown [1.77.0]

Welcome back to another Ingress Teardown. Continuing the trend of a release every two weeks we are back with another version! This version is rolling out via the Play Store and should reach everyone shortly.

Handshake

Previously explored in 1.76.0, I will cover all handshake changes every version.

Now this is quite the mouthful, so lets take it slowly. All the red highlighted rows have been removed. This does not mean, removed from game. This simply means a configuration variable for this change is no longer required. You can see enableShareButton & enableOrnaments in that list. Basically those changes are on all platforms (iOS & Android) and all currently allowed versions. This means having a variable to turn such a feature off/on is no longer required.

This version proved as a clean-up for all these variables.  Notably is the removal of “minimumCommLatencyMS“, which was the April Fools Prank, hidden by Niantic under a regular variable.

Though, we saw the addition of two changes.

[added] enableSetLocale

Not quite sure what this means yet. The naming obviously points towards setting a locale, but you can already set the Language via Settings -> Ops. The value is still set at 0 (disabled).

[added] disableNewPortalSubmissions

This is a sad one. It appears portal submissions are being removed. Already removed is the option to share images with NIA. We can see this change below.

As you can see the intent was removed. For status on the Seer medal, check our Seer Medal page here. Secondly, once this handshake change is enabled we will see the loss of “New Portal” from our action wheel.

As you can see from this example. The ability to submit new portals may be coming to an end.

Dependencies, Build System, etc

Ingress runs off the LibGDX. This version updated LibGDX to 1.5.6, our first update to the framework since LibGDX 1.0.0. If this interests you, feel free to read the release announcement of 1.5.6 and all versions between that and 1.0.0.

Secondly, the internal Google Services received an update. I couldn’t find any information on the update, but tons of files related to maps & wearables were updated.

Finally, Ingress used to be built on API 19 tools. As of 1.77.0, Ingress is built with API 22 tools (5.1 Lollipop).

All of this mention is very nerdy information. Don’t fret if none of it makes sense.

Languages on Languages

Our favorite language selector has gained a ton of languages. Previously available was “Auto”, “English” and “Japanese”. Now see the image below.

You can see we gained the ability to select the following languages.

• German
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese

Conclusion

This version updated two major dependencies in the application, while removing some old handshake changes. This version was very much a cleanup and organization release. Next version might bring some of these changes live to everyone.