Hi everyone and welcome back to another Ingress Teardown. Version 1.98.1 is currently rolling out slowly so like usual we are here to peek into it and see what is coming.

Japan Portal Submissions

So after the news of portal submissions coming back regionally, we saw the addition of latitude and longitude coordinates with specific radius added. The raw data if interested is here. Using this information we can create a visual representation of the areas. We can see from this data that mainly coastline Japan has gained the ability to create portals again, which we learned from this official post here. You must be Level 2 or above and in these areas to submit portals.

Or a more interactive map.

My gut says (No facts or code to back up) that this limited portal submission period is for testing a new backend for approval of said portals. Those veteran agents can attest to the problems of long queue times we had with portal submissions so maybe a new solution was developed and being tested with a small area.

RoboVM Says Goodbye

Let’s put on our learning hats. Ingress uses LibGDX as the underlying engine for the game. For comparison, PokemonGO (Another game by Niantic) uses Unity. In order for LibGDX to provide a cross platform base for developing applications they utilize other popular tools. One of these tools is known as RoboVM – https://robovm.com. RoboVM is the key part for using LibGDX on iOS devices.

However, RoboVM is going away in a year. So what does this mean for Ingress?

The FAQ starts bleak.

RoboVM is dead, what now?

Quite a few libGDX folks have free RoboVM license keys to deploy their libGDX app on iOS. These license keys will continue to work until the 17th of April 2017. However, there will be no further updates to RoboVM, be it new features or bug fixes.

Then it starts to look good.

What is the future of libGDX on iOS?

Tomski has already written a new libGDX backend for Multi-OS engine. Here’s the roadmap for libGDX….

A year is a long time in terms of this game. We have seen multiple anomaly series and a ton of application updates in a year. This might not cause any problems at all as shown above, just an interesting tidbit to bring up.

Conclusion

This version was relatively small in terms of changes so probably was a bug fix release for the Japan portal submissions. The build date was April 13. Aegis Nova is approaching and I’ll see some of you in Savannah!