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With the 2.6 update, our Android players will also be happy to hear that we’ve finally resolved our issues on Google Play, so you’ll be back online with 2.6, as soon as we can finish verifying the stability of the builds.

There were some questions about what exactly happened with Google Play, so let me shed some light on the situation. The short version is, what caused the issue was that we included a crash reporting tool in our games that would basically send emergency error reports to us in the event of app crashes so that we could gather telemetry and hopefully fix problems even without crash reports.

Unfortunately, that crash reporting software gathered this data using a Google Play Service called AdvertisingID, which tracks information about your phone’s hardware specs - really valuable in crash reporting, but unfortunately also subject to Google’s new policy on disclosure of data gathering, which meant we had to implement a message in-game describing basically what I just wrote above, or take it out. We did some evaluation, and decided to remove it in its entirety, so that’s all gone now.

That work was fairly trivial, but what unfortunately wasn’t trivial was that the build pipeline we used for all of the IE games on Google Play since we released 2.5 was deprecated, and we had to basically rebuild the project for our IE titles on Android entirely before we would be able to even resubmit. There used to be 3 ways to build for Android - all Google-approved, but the one we were using lost out when they decided to switch over, and now everything has to go through Android Studio. The silver lining being that thanks to this update, we’ve also updated to 64-bit and API level 26, which was necessary to stay listed on Google Play when it eventually removes support for 32-bit apps. We’re almost at the end of that road, and once we’ve verified that everything’s in good shape, we can QA it, and hopefully get it to you within the next few weeks.

Maps have long played a critical role in video games, whether as the main user interface, a reference guide, or both. As games become more sophisticated, so too does the cartography that underpins them.