All information is relevant as of v2.19.0 on Android.

Frontend

Technology

The frontend of Datapad is built and packaged as a HTML5/JavaScript game that primarily utilizes the following libraries:

• Phaser, the main game engine that drives the UI and UX
• three.js, for handling AR experiences
• Polyglot.js, for internationalization and translation
• NewRelic, for frontend analytics
• PlayAPI, a proprietary API for communicating with the Play Disney Parks application layer

Notes

• The entire app is modularized with RequireJS and likely packed into the single-file release with UglifyJS through the RequireJS optimization tool. It’s worth noting that the sources haven’t been mangled or minified, but the comments have been removed for the entire application
  • Library files retain their comments
• While the build output is JavaScript (ES6), the source is likely in TypeScript due to the presence of the __asyncValues and __asyncGenerator helper functions.

Backend

Technology

The backend utilizes the following libraries (relevant to Datapad)

• Firestore, at least during development
  • While seemingly unused in the release build, an empty Firestore environment configuration file is included
  • Datapad data files, stored locally, also seem to be dumps of Firestore databases, with each data file using the following format:

{
	// ...
	"<Firestore random, unique document ID>": {
		// Document data
	}
	// ...
}

• Project Griffon, from Adobe Experience Platform
• Unity, for…?
  • I’m not sure where this is actually utilized, but the build contains a libil2cpp.so for arm64-v8a and armeabi-v7a targets, and disassembling them reveals that it seems to be a fairly fleshed-out C# reimplementation of the Java backend that handles the PlayAPI message loop (see below), as well as an example game, and some basic activities.
  • It also contains subassemblies that reference minigames for “StormRider”, presumably the ride at Tokyo Disneyland, but I can’t figure out why — it closed in 2016 (two years before the app was released) and it would be the only reference to the app having any sort of functionality in Tokyo Disneyland
  • The Stormrider subassembly within the Unity application is likely the internal codename for the Disney Uncharted Adventure app

Notes

The backend is likely mostly or completely written in Kotlin due to the high volume of Kotlin-compiler-generated features, stubs, and annotations present throughout the disassembly.

The frontend is served in a WebView that is notable in a few ways:

• WebSockets are supported (only secure ones)
  • Likely to support Project Griffon, since Datapad doesn’t utilize this feature
• Hosts the bidirectional async message loop that the frontend PlayAPI uses to issue commands to the Android layer, or receive events from the Android layer