Welcome back to another Ingress teardown. 1.66.0 is currently on rollout to a Play Store near you. While this version has the official changelog of “Bug fixes & Mission Pause feature“. We know there is a lot more to be found hidden away in the APK. So lets dig into 1.66.0.

Obfuscation Woes

Like I mentioned in the 1.65.0 teardown, the obfuscation used the last two versions of Ingress has stepped up its game. Another version with 7000+ files changed. As you can imagine, this is nearly impossible to check for changes manually. My scripts for automating this process are learning slowly how to adapt to these changes, but till then it’s quite possible that I will miss something.

New Item: EXTRA_SHIELD continued

This image (right) was included in 1.66.0. If you remember in the previous teardown, this image was a blank placeholder. This means development is continuing for this shield. If you focus you can see the little “AXA” logo in the base of shield in the image.

Crafty explorers after the last teardown found the location of this image, which matched exactly to the image in the APK. Below you can see a Google search returns information about this company. Immediately you can see the similarities between the logo of the company and the lettering on the shield.

There is no solid proof yet what this item is for or how it operates. Lots of speculation started last version over ideas, it will be interesting to find out the true purpose of this item once development of it finishes.

Ingress Wearables

It’s safe to say, Ingress is coming to Wearables. This version included tons of changes which confirm my guesses. First off we have a new string

<string name="REENGAGEMENT_PORTAL_NEARBY">Ingress Portal Nearby. Hack it!</string>

This string along with the addition of RECIEVE_BOOT_COMPLETED (basically Ingress knows when your phone turns on), allows it to react and start what’s called “Smart Notifications”. This fancy class has tons of criteria which help it know when/how to alert you. The below list is just a snippet of some of the configurations and tweaks that this Smart Notification has.

playerRProbabilityE6

rLPlayerMs

rMinPollingDelayMs

maximumPortalCacheSize

portalCacheEntryExpirationTimeMs

nearbyPortalDistanceM

loiteringMs

noLongerNearbyDistanceM

rNearbyPortalDistanceGrowthRate

rMaxGrownNearbyPortalDistanceM

rWaitPeriodsMs

Basically, this thing is smart. Currently I see the feature is available for anyone whose Google account ends in @google.com. So Google employees are testing this out. Which probably explains why Anne (A Niantic employee, received a LG Watch)

To confirm. It looks like the only functionality so far of the Wear extension is to alert you when you are near to a portal.

Conclusion

This version was built on November 25, but found us on December 3rd. It seems there is a two week development cycle of feature development & bug fixes. Wearables and the new Shield item should be launching here shortly. Check back next time for another teardown, and hopefully we will have a slighter bigger teardown. This was a relatively small release in terms of content to explore.