Ingress Prime APK Teardown [2.46.1]

Hi everyone and welcome back to another Ingress Prime teardown. While the release notes were bare, we’ve noticed quite a few under development features, so with that – here is our deep dive into Prime 2.46.1.

Battle Beacons

These used to be hard-coded to 6 rounds, but all of that has been removed to be a dynamic amount of rounds which is now referred to as checkpoints in the code. It appears that while the default may be 6 checkpoints it is configurable.

+Not enough checkpoints specified to setup battle beacon score board.
+Not enough checkpoints specified to setup portal battle beacon score board.
+No winner team specified for checkpoint {0}.

We additionally noticed that the scoreboard we saw in earlier teardowns requires a few checkpoints before it will be displayed. The assets for this feature remained unchanged, with the exception of some audio which we will discuss below.


App Ratings

It appears Niantic wants to dig out the mess that is the iOS (3.5 stars) and Android (3.0 stars) ratings and I don’t blame them. An application simply dies out with a bad rating and while the Prime launch was scuffed beyond belief, I don’t think anyone can disagree that many improvements have been made (and continue to be made).

This update introduces a server side configurable flag for adding a snippet into the settings page for asking for a rating.

+RateOurAppSettings
get_EnableRateOurApp
private RateOurAppSettingsProto rateOurAppSettings_;

Subscription Store

This feature is very difficult to inspect at a code level because of the generic meaning of subscription. An object may subscribe to updates in the game, but at the same time an agent may subscribe to some package. It appears a store is being built that resembles benefits/packages for the subscription (optional) that was rumored.

+SubscriptionStoreBannerImage
+SubscriptionStoreBannerImageBodyKey
+SubscriptionStoreBannerImageTitleKey
+SubscriptionDetailsSettings
private SubscriptionDetailsProto subscriptionDetailsSettings_;

This looks in early development in comparison to Battle Beacons so not much more information is available at this time. (The image above was added in this release, maybe some new functionality is behind a lock. (?))


New Powerup (Fireworks)

Our secret unknown5 has gained a real name and it is Fireworks. The firework comes in 3 different designations:

  • Firework_ENL
  • Firework_RES
  • Firework_NEUTRAL

At first I thought they were obtained from winning a Battle Beacon then applied like a beacon to it. However, it fits in the same class as APEX which applies directly to a player. I cannot figure out if this is meant for the portal (my guess) or the agent. It is common in some video games to obtain a badge for success and “brag” about it to other players when interacting, but you can’t really do that in Ingress outside of looking at profile pages. It’ll be interesting to see where this feature ends up.

public const string POWERUP_TYPE_FIREWORKS = "FW";
public static bool IsFireworks(string designation) { }

public const PowerupDesignation FW_ENL = 21;
public const PowerupDesignation FW_RES = 22;
public const PowerupDesignation FW_NEUTRAL = 23;

Sounds

While Ingress leverages a more optimized asset delivery mechanism it is more difficult to extract audio until the application is rolled out, but some of these new sound names have me perplexed.

  • BattleBeaconDeploy
  • CheckpointAlert
  • FinalCheckpointAlert
  • FireworksExplosion
  • FinalFlagLand
  • FireworkLoop
  • FireworkWhistlesOneshot
  • PurchasedItemFlyout
  • CountupLoop
  • CountupOneshot
  • NonItemFlyout

Just glancing at this list looks to be sounds for the Battle Beacon, Store Subscriptions (?) and the new powerup – Fireworks.


Performance Logging

It appears Niantic is taking a stab at loading issues and general optimizations. A few additional things are being logged to investigate devices that may experience lockups. The following information is being calculated now.

  • Time to boot application
  • Time for Unity to boot
  • Time for Unity scenes to be ready
  • A variety of other timings

Conclusion

This was a large release from a bunch of different topics which is exciting to see. We will see you agents next time.