⚠️ service hazard: android 7 support may end oct 4th

matt-yml / pk

PK's Public system to track issues and update on work

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⚠️ service hazard: android 7 support may end oct 4th #112

Closed matt-yml closed 9 months ago

matt-yml commented 1 year ago

Adaptation to Niantic's Discontinuation of Android 7 Support

Context:

Niantic have announced the discontinuation of support for Android 7 (Nougat) in their upcoming Pokémon GO release 285.0. There was a recent unusually abrupt forced update to 283.1. This change poses direct implications on our data collection methods since our bots are all based on Android 7.

Scope of Impact:

Potential halting of real-time data gathering for web maps.
Interruptions in Discord alerts

Solutions Under Consideration:

Upgrading bots to a newer, supported Android version.
Creating, testing, and deploying ROMs for the 3 mainline bot models

Next Steps:

Immediate assessment of the full impact on the service.
Exploration and testing of identified solutions.
Engage the community for feedback and insights.

Additional Notes:

This issue is high urgency and remedies are actively being planned.
Relevant findings, updates, or progress concerning this issue will be documented in follow-up comments.

matt-yml commented 1 year ago

great progress today 🥳

about 1/3 of our units run on the S912 processor architecture. working with other devs we were able to manually get a procedure to run android 9 on it.

it's been playing the game for about 6 hours without issues, and it doesn't appear to have malware or other problems. from russia with 💖

normally i just flash a pre-cooked ROM image and have automation put the unique flavors on the box.

the new procedure is several dozen steps and is almost completely manual.

the victory here is that even if it's manual i can likely get about 10% of devices running android 9 by the 4th

that means we'll have raid scans, invasions, some quests, and sparse spawns.

hopefully i'll figure out a way to package this image into a flashable ROM, cut out 50 manual steps, and more rapidly deploy android 9.

still need procedures/images for the other 2 models account for the other ~80ish units in the fleet.

matt-yml commented 11 months ago

Good news: We have ROMs for 2/3 of our models. So we're in the process of replicating and flashing in mass.

Bad news: about 25% of our bots are obsolete unless a ROM is found. Other ROM devs have given up, but I'll keep these around until Niantic culls the Android 7 scene.

Fortunately though we're able to stay on the 64bit track for surviving models though.

A couple years ago Niantic said they were giving up 32bit, so that hammer could drop anytime too

Currently it takes 45-60mins per unit for flash and setup; heavily automated too. :grimacing:

I'm paralleling as much as possible, but this is a very time expensive process.

Hopefully we have some buffer by skipping Android 8 to A9 🤞 :crystal_ball:

matt-yml commented 11 months ago

working through units and trying to stay ahead of the curve. there are a lot of variations of these things. despite settling on 3 main models i'm hitting a "snowflake" effect: no two atvs are alike.

trying to automate more and standardize.

tracker sheet for devices and versions: pkradar device inventory

matt-yml commented 11 months ago

a couple big breakthroughs!

network install - flash latest ROMs and no USB key drive juggling
atv watchdog - now running the development version that can handle android 9

this should speed up the process as we develop better ROMs and hopefully reclaim the 20-40% of atvs lost to android 7 obsolescence.