"The Silph Road's APK mine of v0.75.0 is complete! The largest bug-fix update to-date: fixes, re-works, secret debugging tools, search upgrades, and new event badges."

#PokemonGO: To the thousands of new faces who have joined the Silph Road recently: welcome! Please check out our top stickied post and sidebar to learn what the Silph Road is all about. The Silph Road team's long-running APK teardown series examines the new code changes introduced with the latest APK for hints at what's to come in Pokemon GO. Glad to have you with us on the Road!Finally an APK update that doesn't drop in the wee hours of the morning for the Silph Road team! (This time it only coincided with the Apple Keynote and it's new Augmented Reality tech. But who cares about that, right?)After diving through the APK, this appears to be the largest bug-fix update to date, travelers - and only 12 days after the last update. Niantic appears to be prioritizing stability updates for these periodic rollouts while they chew on the next major additions to Pokemon GO.Let's dive in to v0.75.0, travelers!Features & EventsFirst off, the new stuff:1. Search Upgrades: Defender, Legendary, and MovesetsCode has appeared which confirms the official patch notes' note that you can now search by "defender" to see gym-deployed Pokemon, "legendary" to see your legendary catches, and a new pokemonMoveNameMap shows that move names are now searchable via a listing (map) of move names.Glad to see this make it to the ever-deepening functionality on the Pokemon Collection screen's search.2. New Journal EntriesCheck out your journals after spinning Gym photo discs (or winning Raids) - there's a new (and surprisingly informative!) entry system which highlights the items earned by team bonuses and gym badge bonuses.3. Safari Zone BadgesIn preparation for the Safari Zone events next month in Europe, badges have been added for both the October 7th and October 14th events.Bug FixesNow to the heart of this update:4. Pokedex Cache Bug FixThe sprite caching bug introduced in v0.73 has had major fixes introduced assumedly to resolve it.In fact, much of the code has been re-written, with different new entities (like the pokemonIconCache) removed entirely. We should know very soon whether this fix is effective at resolving the issue!5. Avatar Texture FixesThough reports have already surfaced that this visual glitch is not fully resolved in v0.75.0, a fix has appeared involving cached avatar textures. Presumably this will help reduce the admittedly interesting avatar texture glitches.6. Gym Attack Animation FixesThis appears to be a fix for the odd issue where gym attack animations appeared around your avatar under certain circumstances. Goodbye superpowers.7. Raid Intro (Zoom) Sequence FixCode has appeared that we believe is intended to curtail the 'double animation sequence' bug where entering/leaving a Raid will play the zoom in animation an extra time.8. Raid Lobby FixesChanges have been made to how frequently the Raid lobby's GUI is rendered - presumably in an effort to more accurately reflect the live lobby count. Reports still show issues with the count post-update, but keep an eye out for any improvements on this bug, travelers.Re-WorksThe following are observations we found notable that aren't tied to specific bug:9. Largescale Changes to Gym StatesMuch has been re-worked in regards to gym animations and gym states (including the lockout conditions among many others). Nothing clearly emerges as a reasoning or focus, but our guess is that this is a stability upgrade targeting some of the error conditions.Secret Debugging ToolsNiantic has expanded its internal debugging toolset with a few notable additions, which hints at their development focus:10. New Memory Performance Debugging ToolAn entirely new debugging tool has been added in Niantic Performance namespace called Memory. With it comes tools to monitor and handle memory warnings during testing, including during raids and wild encounters, as well as framerate and other metrics.This appears to be a concrete step towards diagnosing memory issues more quickly in future development - a welcome addition. :)11. New RPC Debugging ToolsAlong with the Memory monitoring tool mentioned above, a whole new RPC debugging tool has appeared.RPC (or remote procedure calls) are, in essence, the network request layer of Pokemon GO, and are a difficult challenge to nail in any real-time mobile app.This new RPC debugger looks like a simple way to monitor RPC calls for debugging purposes.12. New Network Debugging ToolsFinally, a third debugging tool has appeared in Niantic's Performance namespace: Network that pairs with the RPC debugger above.This tool appears to be used in tandem with the RPC debugger and monitors network latency issues. The average latency and RPC history is now able to be examined.What Niantic has in mind for these tools we can't say - but it's great to see them taking clear and obvious steps to diagnose and resolve the UX issues inherent in buggy networking and memory leaks!13. Gym Location Data LoaderThis is an interesting one. It appears to be solely for debugging purposes for now, but metadata has appeared that hints that in debug-mode, Pokemon GO can load a file of Gym metadata and populate locations through it:locationsConfigFilePathLoadLocationsFromFileetc...This may be a way to enable easier event-specific gyms appearing in the future, or it may simply be for debugging non-live gyms, or something else entirely. But at any rate, it's the first time we've seen anything like it!Well, hope you all enjoyed the Apple Keynote teardown, travelers!Once again, this is the largest effort we've seen to date at improving memory, network, and other performance issues. It bodes well that Niantic has been focusing on this - we hope over time the game will continue to get more solid and smooth.In the meantime, we'll certainly enjoy the more descriptive journal entries and search functions while we wait for the next large quarterly update. :)Travel safe,- Executive Dronpes - via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2xvwVG6