You're playing your favorite Android game and you know that you've definitely met the
requirements for one of the game's achievements, but for some reason the game doesn't register you
as having obtained that achievement. If you're like me, this is extremely frustrating--enough to
make you want to figure out how to hack the Google Play achievement system. So, here is a rough
outline of a guide to help you do the same thing.
Note: I acknowledge how useless and pointless these game achievements are. There is no real value
to be gained by doing what I'm about to describe. There is only the personal satisfaction that comes
from having figured out something for yourself.
Tools needed:
1. access to shell with root via adb on your computer AND/OR
2. SQLite Editor (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...ware.sqleditor) (requires
root)
It turns out that all of the Google Play achievement data resides in a sqlite database stored
in /data/data/com.google.android.gms/databases/games_1234abcd.db. (The name of your db
file will be different--you may have multiple versions of this file for each Google account that
lives on your device.)
There are several important tables in this SQLite db file:
1. achievement_definitions --> defines all of the achievements that your device
knows about
2. achievement_instances --> a record of which achievements have been
obtained and when, progress toward incremental achievements
3. achievement_pending_ops --> table of pending updates to achievements that
haven't been synced with Google's servers
4. games --> lists external_game_ids for all games that have been encountered
5. game_instances --> lists package names so that we can identify what games
correspond to what context_ids
6. client_contexts --> contains information about apps that have recently
communicated with Google's servers (get the context_client_id from this table)
To trick Google Play to add achievements, we add entries to the achievement_pending_ops
table. Then opening Play Games will cause a sync and register those achievements as having
been obtained. My advice is that you first get one of these pending_ops so that you can see
its structure so as to create your own spoof entries. To do this, play any game in which you
can get an easy achievement. Start the game on your device with internet connectivity and
