It’s been a while without communication, but we have a lot going on. We are also receiving support emails for PS5 games support on the app. It’s time to give you some explanations and visibility and take stock of the situation in terms of PS5 support and the future of the application.

Why no PS5 support currently?

Sony, as it had already done when the PS4 was released, has not updated its (private) API to support new PS5 features, but has remade from scratch a new API (used by the new official app).

This therefore requires modifying YaPSNapp to conform to the new API. (the old API does not return the PS5 games and trophies)

Consequences

We therefore started to work in order to make YaPSNapp compatible, here are the first elements that question us:

The new API has been designed for the official app, we will experience the same regressions, and  some other “issues” related to their questionable technical design (Thanks Sony!)

• Messages can now only be sent between PS4 and PS5, so PS3 and PSVita will no longer receive any message sent via the application
• The “Online” / “Last seen on” statuses are only present for PS4 and PS5. Same observation, online statuses for PS3 & PSVita can no more be displayed.
• Because the PS3 / PSVita online stauts are no more available, the game sessions for these consoles won’t be able to be stored on the app
• Their new API aiming to appear faster on the official application (by correcting the recurring slowness of the API), they decided to cut out all their services, examples:
  • The recovery of the list of friends (necessary for updates, addition / deletion of friends) is done via a call returning only a list of internal identifiers without any other information
  • Name / PSNID retrieval is done via a call returning this information (by grouping all friend IDs)
  • The “Online / Offline” status of these friends is retrieved by a 3rd call (by grouping all the identifiers of the friends)
  • The “Trophy summary” retrievement (The level / progression / total number of bronze / silver / gold and platinum trophies for the profile) is done by a new unit call. (Limited to a single player ID, in the official application: when you go to a player’s profile)

In the case of YaPSNApp where we want to display the level / progress of each player in the friends list, and see if new trophies have been obtained for each of them (the small red ribbon indicating the number of trophies obtained since the last update). This implies therefore, that for a list of 500 friends it would require 500 API calls (just to retrieve this info)

This adds complexity, but it just makes the current application operation impossible. As a reminder (maybe some of you have already had a 429 error in YaPSNapp), Sony sets a quota of 200 calls per period of one hour to their API … so technically point 4 is not even possible.

Stream analysis for games and trophies does not seem to have suffered too much from the revamping (note however that by completely redesigning their API, there is not a single additional useful info allowing us to add functionalities. “standard” to the application)

The analysis of message flows do not seem to pose new problems (apart from the “premature?” Release of the PS3 and PSVita)

In summary, a lot of work to make YAPSNApp compatible with the PS5 (losing features in the process)

• implementation to call the new API (in progress: 50%)
• Modifications to be made to the affected screens and functionalities:
  • We are going to limit the number of friends that can be marked as “favorite” to 15.
  • We will restrict the automatic updating of Levels / Progress / Total trophies to the list of your friends marked as “Favorite” in the application.
    • For these “favorite” friends, the Levels / Progress / Trophy Summary will be kept up to date at  each friends list “Refresh”, which will allow to keep the functionality of tracking the trophies won by these friends)
    • For the others, the update of this information will have to be done by going to the screen of this friend’s games and updated manually.
  • The friends list will no longer be able to display the Level / Progress of each player
  • The “Ranking” screen comparing the Levels / Total of trophies will be removed (present on the iOS version only)
  • The watermark of “Ranking” in the friends list (and its associated display setting) will be removed

But there is some other news

A redesign of the iOS application is on track (Redesign / new technical base) and new features are under development:

• We are going to focus the application a little more on help with trophies and the profile of the connected player
• New “My profile” screen with all player statistics
• Games search screen (Presentation of available games with their number of points / potential trophies / list of trophies / Guides / Platinum ease / etc.)
• “Advisor – Todo” screen for our “to do” games and trophies
• Side standard features: Addition of the friend requests management
• Complete UI redesign (here are some screens)

As the Android version has received a nice graphics update recently, the new features will also follow without the design change at first.

I will keep you informed (by updating this post) of the various advances on these subjects:

• Yapsnapp 3.6: Adaptations of existing apps to the new API + PS5 support (iOS / Android): 50% – Target end of February 2020
• UI / Design of the iOS application (iPhone / iPad): 90% – End of January 2020
• YaPSNapp v4 iOS: Redesign of the iOS application (universal iPhone / iPad application): 10% – Target June 2021