Ingress Prime APK Teardown [2.12.0]

Hello everyone, welcome back to our first of many Ingress Prime teardowns. This process around the web is more commonly known as “data mining”, but we are going to keep calling it “APK teardowns.” With that out of the way, lets jump into Ingress Prime 2.12.0.

Intro

This is the first teardown of the Prime era, so lets recap our method here at Fev Games:

  • We don’t discuss anything that benefits the “anti-cheat” portion of Ingress.
  • We don’t provide application downloads.
  • We provide extracted information and draw conclusions, as best we can from the information at hand.
  • All assets/text extracted are owned by Niantic and provided here to comment upon.

With that lets jump into the big changes that Ingress Prime (v2) brought:

  • Welcome Unity
    • This wasn’t a big surprise as we knew Ingress Prime would follow in the footsteps of Pokémon GO and it did.
  • Shared Code
    • The patterns between Pokémon GO and Ingress Prime at the low-level engines are shared.
    • This means future enhancements will benefit both games.
  • Complete UI Rework
    • With plenty of new assets to examine, we can quickly see if/when new items are being developed.

Ornaments

We saw the returning addition of the ornaments familiar in the v1 application.

  • CLUSTER
  • FINISH_POINT
  • MEETUP_POINT
  • VOLATILE

Usually tweaked with colors during anomalies. This means in terms of parity both iterations of Ingress will support ornaments for the anomalies this weekend.


The Store

With the unexpected launch of “hackable” items in the store, players responded quick and Niantic followed up. We can see some changes happening around the store. The following new categories were added.

  • CATEGORY_BUNDLE2
  • CATEGORY_BUNDLE2_DESCRIPTIONS
  • CATEGORY_SPECIALDESCRIPTIONS

This joins the existing categories of

  • SPECIAL
  • BUNDLE
  • FRACKER
  • KEYLOCKER
  • BEACON
  • CMU
  • UNKNOWN

Perhaps this adjustment will allow slightly different displays of store items.


The Intel Link

We saw an update to the onboarding which added support for the Ingress website, intel map and YouTube page.

public const string IntelUrl = "https://www.ingress.com/intel/";

With all the redirects and slight hiccups with intel map, it seems the app will use an old iteration of the intel map location. Thankfully the redirect to the proper location is working.


Recursion

We saw plenty of updates in regards to recursed agents. As most are probably aware, an optional faction change is granted during the recurse process. This leads to resonators owned by the same agent on both sides, which can be slightly confusing.

  • portalOwnerRecursedIcon
  • originalTeam
  • currentlySimulatedTeam

It seems this release will help clear up some of that confusion with changes to the portal detail screen and other locations that agent name may be presented.


Temporary Faction

There have been some bugs lately, where the on-board process encounters a bug and drops the agent in question into a generic (Agent-######) account and allows them to play. As the bugs work themselves out, the agent is allowed to pick an agent name, however may be locked to the Resistance team from the original bug. This doesn’t seem fair to the Enlightened so Niantic put forward a fix for this discovery. I imagine these problems slipped through the cracks, because all beta testers already had accounts. No one was creating new accounts (nor could they) in the beta program.

We saw the addition of – TEMP_FACTION_SEQUENCE, which seems to alleviate those problems. We asked for screenshots of the on-board process with version 2.12.0 and received these screenshots.

What is interesting to note is the message “You will be allowed to choose later.” Faction onboarding with all these easy to use options to change sides might create some complexity in the regional communities of both teams.


Conclusion

It seems Niantic prioritized this release very well. Changes for the upcoming anomaly and the immediate fixes for the confusion and bugs revolving around recursion and agent onboarding. This is the start to an exciting release schedule and we hope to cover all the changes coming. Till next time, agents.

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