How do I patch an android game I paid for, but now doesn't work because the devs shut a server off?
I paid for Puzzle Quest 2 on android like a decade+ ago. It is a local single-player game. It has a validation check when you open the app. That check fails because this game is ancient and the servers are offline.
I want to replay the game I paid for. I have the APK from an APK site. It's even been pulled from steam to push their crappy p2w pq3. Anyone have tricks to crank an APK and bypass a server check? I've decompiled the APK but am in a bit over my head.
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with sonic runners, they had to reverse engineer the whole server infrastructure. i'd say the chances of you patching out server checks without decompiling the entire game are low.
but i'm not any kind of programmer, so i'd love to be proven wrong.
I'm a few kinds of programmer, and that's pretty much it.
It really depends on the app. Plenty of Android apps have very simple to do premium bypass.
Server checks aren't always just an arbitrary gate at the start so this makes sense. For example, if the game has unlockable things (paid or not) and those things sync across multiple devices, then server checks to make sure your progress get saved and merged together properly can be woven through the whole game.
I wonder if in this case you could just mimic the OG server and return a 200. Could just do that with a hosts file change. Although if it's looking for anything else from that verification endpoint then decompiling would be the answer.
I mean decompiling it isn't really an issue. Adding changes and recompiling without breaking things is more of a challenge but still doable.