Pokemon Go is perhaps the most popular game published ever by Niantic. Once a startup under Google, the San Francisco based company made their fortune by bringing a revolution in mobile AR gaming. Their journey started with Ingress – the spiritual ancestor of Pokemon Go.
Released back in 2013, Ingress helped Niantic to build the strong foundation on which they developed games like Pokemon Go or Harry Potter Wizards Unite. The backend engine of Ingress is the key ingredient behind these AR based mobile games, which successfully hypnotized numerous players across the world.
These Niantic games heavily rely on the location functionality of the smartphone, as well as employ various system level APIs to ensure a cheat-free and fair gameplay. As a matter of interest, all those practices backfired as Android Q beta brought a permanent incompatibility to them.
In one of our previous articles, we discussed the current scenario of Pokemon Go and Android Q beta builds. The game simply gets stuck at the loading screen, which is rather peculiar. Although some users are speculating about failed SafetyNet values, apparently that’s not the case.
Someone pointed out the newly introduced READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE permission in Android Q as the culprit. As reading device serial number is one of the primary constraints of Ingress, Pokemon Go or Harry Potter Wizards Unite, the restriction is causing the crash and/or infinite loading screen.
tl;dr Android Q bans are caused from Ingress reading the serial number from the device and returning “unknown”. This is part of an Android security update to prevent malicious applications from reading sensitive, unique information. To fix this issue, Niantic needs to add permissions for READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE to the Redacted APK.
(Source)
Nonetheless, the incompatibility between Niantic games and Android Q beta is still at large – at least till now. With the release of the fifth i.e. the penultimate beta release, the APIs of the new version of Android are now finalized.
Call it a coincidence, but Niantic apparently solved the issue(s) with Android Q with the newest update of Ingress Prime. In the official announcement thread regarding UI Update 1, they allegedly acknowledged about the fix.
The 2.27 update of Ingress Prime is gradually rolling out, although you can manually sideload the APK by downloading it from APK Mirror. Do give it a try on Android Beta 5 and let us know if you can play the game without any hiccup or not.
Interpolating from the comment and the facts, other two Niantic games – Pokemon Go and Harry Potter Wizards Unite (HPWU) – should eventually receive new updates from their maker with similar fixes. Don’t forget to comment below if you notice such improvements.
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Kingshuk De
896 Posts
I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.
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