RE: Redacted. The last thing the original Ingress client was ever called was Scanner [REDACTED] - and this is a reply to it. RE: as in the header on a message you’re answering, and as in reverse engineering, which is how the answering is done. Not Redacting a second time; the other direction entirely.

Ingress launched in 2012. For six years it was the game where you walked to a real place, tapped a portal, and argued with someone about whether the walk was worth it. In 2018 the original client was replaced by a new one, and the servers the old client spoke to were switched off.

You can still install the original app on a phone that supports 32bit apps. It still starts. Then it reaches for something that is no longer there, and stops. Every copy of it in the world is in that state, and has been since the shutdown.

This project is an attempt to write down what that app used to say to its servers, in enough detail to answer it and to evoke the correct response on the client. On a tablet on my desk, the original Ingress client now starts, accepts an identity, loads an inventory of a handful of items, draws portals, fires weapons, deploys resonators, captures a portal and recharges it - talking to a server I wrote from notes, running on the same machine.

That is the whole of it. It is the same kind of work as writing a console emulator, or a replacement server for a shut-down online game: documenting a protocol well enough that a piece of software which can no longer run is able to run again.

What this is not

I want to be clear and upfront, so:

• It does not touch the game that is running today. The Ingress app that is currently at Version 3.X is a different game and a living one. Nothing here reaches it, holds a credential for it, or interferes with it in any way. My server listens only on the machine it runs on.
• It is not a way to play. There is and will be nothing to download here - not the app, not the changes I made to it, not the server. I write about what I found out. I do not hand out the means to reproduce it, and I will not do so privately either. Please do not ask; I would rather say no once, here, than say no repeatedly.
• It does not compete with anything. There is no live version of the old game to gain standing in. The goal is simply an old client that boots so we can document it.
• It uses only my own things. My own copy of the app, my own hardware, my own account data where needed. When other players’ names appear in my own view of the game (for example, when I replay COMM for testing), they stay out of what I publish.
• It is not affiliated with Niantic, or with Niantic Spatial who operate the game now, or endorsed by either, or speaking for either. Ingress and the names of things in it are theirs.
• It is not a business. There is nothing to buy here, no advertising, and no way to donate. See Money, below.

Ingress, the client, its artwork and the names of things in it belong to Niantic. What I write about them here is documentation and study - describing how a piece of software worked, with short excerpts and screenshots where they are needed to explain a point, in a project that hands out none of it. That distinction is the one I care most about getting right, and it is why the second point above is not negotiable.

A note on names

The game has been called several things and this gets confusing quickly, so, for the whole of this site:

• The original client means the app that ran from 2012 to 2018. Its final name in the store was Scanner [REDACTED], which is where this project’s name comes from. That is the app being preserved here, and it is the only one I ever modify or run against my own server. You will likely see me refer to it as REDACTED, Redacted, or simply v1.
• Where I say Prime, or v2, I mean the client released in 2018 - the replacement for REDACTED. Almost every agent should know what that means, so I’ll still use the word Prime, but strictly speaking it stopped being the product’s name a short while ago when Niantic Spatial was spun out of Niantic and updated Ingress to Version 3.X. In essence, it is still the same game, uses the same engine and uses the same servers, so for all intents and purposes, its the same client.
• Ingress, unqualified, means the game as it exists today.

Why bother

Because the alternative is that it is simply gone.

Software that depends on a server does not survive its shutdown the way a cartridge or a floppy disc survives. Every copy of the original Ingress client is intact, but every copy is useless, which is a strange and fairly new way for a thing to be lost. There is no dedicated archive you can visit to see what it looked like in motion, no screenshot that shows how it felt to hold, and there will not be one unless somebody works out how to switch it back on (ignoring the screenshots and videos Agents have posted over the years, but which become more and more hard to find by the day).

Six years of a lot of people’s walking happened in that app. It seems worth being able to look at it.

How the work is actually done

Most of it is done by an AI. Specifically Claude, working in long sessions against the app, the captured traffic and its own previous notes - reading the client’s code, forming theories, building instruments to test them, writing the server, and drafting most of what you read here. I direct it, run everything that needs a screen or a finger on a tablet, supply the data, argue with its conclusions, and decide what happens next.

I want to be clear about this for two reasons. It is a large enough part of how this exists that leaving it out would be a lie by omission. And this kind of work - patient, repetitive, enormous in volume, occasionally requiring somebody to read four thousand lines of decompiled code looking for one comparison - turns out to be something a machine is genuinely, unexpectedly good at. That seems worth being open about rather than quietly benefiting from.

What that does not mean is that anything here is unchecked. Every article is read line by line by a person before it goes up, and every factual claim in it is traced back to something actually observed - a measurement on the device, a line in the app’s own code, or my own experience of having played the game. Things get cut and corrected at that stage regularly. Same for the Telegram channel, if more briefly: Nothing is published because a model asserted it.

Money

There is no way to donate to this project, and nothing here is behind a paywall — now or ever.

I did look into it, because the work runs on a paid AI service and that costs real money. But every route I could find - Ko-fi, PayPal, the rest of them - puts my legal name on the receipt the person donating gets back. I would rather write under the project’s name than have that be the price of someone chipping in three euros.

So: nothing to give to. If that ever changes, this section changes with it.

About the writing

Findings here are labelled according to how much weight they carry. When something has been measured on the device, I say so plainly. When it is read out of the app’s own code, I say that. When it is game knowledge from having played for years, I say that too. And when it is a guess, I say it is a guess and what would settle it - because this project has already been confidently wrong multiple times, held the wrong model for a while, and only found out by building a tool to check instead of arguing with itself.

I would rather be corrected than quoted. If something here is wrong, please tell me.

contact@reredacted.com - corrections, questions, and anything I you think I have got wrong here. Feel free to also just say “Hello”!