Keep Scanner REDACTED
You guys "want Ingress to be fun and safe for the players." Ingress Prime is NO FUN, and trying to play it is somewhat less safe. Please reconsider ending support for Scanner REDACTED. I've tried it twice, I hate it. Last time I tried it SR was down, and I only went to Prime in hopes of keeping a daily hack and recharging a few portals. I think that this time around you'll lose most of us old dinosaur players. I think you don't want us... that you actually make money with Wizards Unite, maybe you make money with Pokemon Go, that those games have a younger player base, and the data you glean from us scurrying around the surface of the Earth is more valuable on these younger players. What reason does Niantic have for NOT continuing support?
Please reconsider
Comments
nah delete it and make prime even better
Btw they'll have the other games contributing to the PoI database and OPR eventually
RoboVM is discontinued, soon Play Store won't allow any apps on that platform. There is no physical possibility to keep Redacted. It's not simply Niantic decision to end just for fun. Anyway they cannot add new features to Redacted too. Prime has potential. We may not like it but we have to cooperate with Niantic to make it better.
This is what Andrew Krug said:
"So, RoboVM is the technology the old classic scanner was built with. Microsoft bought it, then killed it. So it is at, actually past, it's end of life. No longer supported. When software is no longer supported, people don't like their users to use it because it becomes a security risk. If someone discovers a previously unknown vulnerability, it'll never get fix because it's dead. So because RoboVM is dead, the app stores aren't/won't support it. We don't know when they will pull support for apps using it. But it will happen. This is why redacted can't be updated.
And there isn't a straight port from RoboVM to Unity. All the code had to be written from scratch. It's not like a text document that you can just copy and pasted. So since the code had to be written from scratch, the team decided to implement things the way they have wanted. Like being able to use the client with one hand.
So we had a situation where Prime may not be done and Ingress classic would get pulled by the app stores leaving us with no Ingress... Or we release Prime a bit early."
If it was possible to keep Redacted we probably wouldn't have Prime.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to keep Redacted. The September 30 drop dead date was not Niantic's decision to make. This has been explained before.
A few responsive thoughts.
You say Microsoft bought RoboVM and killed it. Who sold it?? If Niantic did, they lost control with the transaction. Maybe Niantic could get whoever designed the Prime scanner to design a second scanner that works and looks like the original scanner did.
As for letting go of the old Scanner and being left with Prime... no thanks. I wasn't suggesting that Niantic go back to the original scanner and pull the plug on anyone who likes Prime, so I'd like for the Prime lover to refrain from dissing the old players who like the original scanner.
Maybe it's all about money. Microsoft is in business to make money. Maybe Niantic could offer a few more bucks to get relicensed for RoboVM.
I like the suggestion of making Prime better, although I'll not use it to find out. Prime can't get any worse, any change would be improvement.
It's not just Microsoft, Apple and probably Android soon too are discontinuing support for RoboVM. Let it go.
Xamarin is the name of the company that sold it. From your line of questioning, I think you've misunderstood the situation. This isn't about licences, RoboVM itself is an out of date piece of software. Microsoft bought the whole of the Xamarin company in 2016, and later that year announced they would end support for RoboVM in 2017. This means it doesn't get security updates, and won't be updated to work with newer operating systems like iOS13 and Android Q.
As for "Maybe Niantic could get whoever designed the Prime scanner to design a second scanner..." that's exactly what they have done! Niantic designed the first once, and they designed the second one too.
Xamarin developed RoboVM and was bought by Microsoft. Dropping support wasn't about money, it was about discontinuing outdated tech.
Niantic has said they WILL NOT develop a second app. Do you know how much it costs to develop a cross platform app?
This has been explained before.
Apple said in April 2017 that all RoboVM apps had to be retired within 18 months. It was a minor miracle that Redacted was approved because it breaks so many App Store rules, particularly running on a RoboVM fork with only one volunteer developer. The September 30 drop dead date was Apple's call. Plus Redacted triggers false positives for cheating on Android 10.
It can't stay here forever, bro. As it started from beta, it changed to 1.0, and now it's 2.0.
RoboVM is passed their expiry date.
I am honestly quite tired listening to it. Those who like me that prefers redacted knows and realised it's time to either put our scanner to rest, or adapt to Prime. I chose the former, but I won't advocate people to feel the same.
It is gone, period. Be prepared to adapt to the change and Prime, or simply give up. Your choice.
Just out of curiosity, have we got a citation for Apple's pronouncements regarding RoboVM apps? My impression up till now is that the Sept 30th date was chosen by Niantic, albeit given pressure from the Apple/Android app stores to retire RoboVM as soon as reasonably possible.
Any sort of deal about dates will have happened under a non-disclosure agreement, so we'll probably never know if the date came from Apple, Google or Niantic's own desire to make back-end changes that Prime can support but Redacted can't.
The closest you'll find to a citation is probably section 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement - but don't expect to be able to understand what that says and why it prohibits ROboVM without getting about half way to a degree level qualification in mobile app development, possibly with a side order of contract law.
No it was not chosen by Niantic. RoboVM apps were supposed to be gone a year ago and it was a miracle Redacted was approved at all last year.
There is no secret deal. It's a matter of public record, as are the issues with RoboVM and iOS 12. It has been discussed at length on Reddit and (although now gone) Google+.
It is pointless going over all this again.
You don't know if there's a secret deal or not, that's how secrets work.
Redacted was keeps that long only because prime was still missing key features. Now it's practically complete. The only thing I'm missing is navigation tool, but is probably almost there since we got nearby portals and during missions it work exactly like that.
I don't agree with the flagging you're receiving, but really, this has been covered so many times, in so many places over the past year or so.
After forcing myself to switch to Prime a few months ago, I really hated going back to Redacted. Enough so that I didn't hesitate when to switch to Android 10 on my phone when it was available.
You don't have to hate things just because they're new. That's the only "old dinosaur" bit of behavior you're displaying.
No it was not chosen by Niantic. RoboVM apps were supposed to be gone a year ago and it was a miracle Redacted was approved at all last year.
So what you're saying is that if Apple had had their way, the retirement date would have been 2018 rather than 2019. That says to me that Niantic chose the date...
There is no secret deal. It's a matter of public record
So let's have a citation then. I don't have time to go away and read the whole of Reddit.
@starwort You can also read it that Niantic was given dispensation with an ultimate deadline by which Redacted would be removed from the stores. Not "Niantic chose the date".
https://gitter.im/MobiVM/robovm
FYI, you can *still* publish apps using robovm.
Support for it officially is end of life, but support still exists, it's still possible to use.
The decision to cease using robovm was Niantic's. Their reasons are there own.
I understand the reason for moving away from robovm, the reasons given by niantic are being restated, each time, with each person's opinion and interpretation.
Redacted 'can' still be maintained, developed etc, niantic have chosen 'not' to go that route.
They have designed a completely different interface for use with prime, that's what people who use redacted, and wish it would remain, most dislike.
I'm one of those people. I do not like prime.
Today, I tried to use up the remainder of my submission slots in Redacted. After that, I will uninstall it in favor of Prime. And good riddence with Redacted crashing every time Android Auto connects or disconnects from my car.
That's the USB leads fault.
Some people have a strange idea what "a completely different interface" is.
Layout is massively different.
Graphics are massively different
What exactly do the two current scanners have in common?
8 days and counting down!
They are interfaces to the same game, but it's like comparing Windows 10 with Windows XP.
Let it go, Let it go! 😁
Prime is not a good platform, if ingress had a wanted a platform like we wanted they should have made one exactly like scanner redacted not this stupid prime, I've tried Prime I've tried to get it to work I've been trying for three days just to get to look at my agent's stats it just sits there and Spins, I sat at at portal for 15 minutes, and never even saw a portal if Prime doesn't work and it locks up all the time it's not worth it, all we want is a scanner like the old one easy to use Simple to use and one that works is that too hard to understand
For clarity, RoboVM was developed by a couple of Swedish guys in a startup called RoboVM. Xamarin, a company that had its own framework for .NET applications bought RoboVM to add to its stable for Java developed apps.
Microsoft then bought Xamarin. They discontinued the RoboVM platform but kept the Xamarin platform making it open source.