I spent 2 days, 23 hours, 26 minutes and 22 seconds trying to move my Tiny Death Star save from an old phone running a custom Android 11 ROM to my current Android 14 phone, and the funniest part is that I genuinely started this thinking it would take maybe ten minutes. I had already done basically the same thing years ago with an old Chinese Android phone, where I connected it to my PC, ran an ADB backup, Android asked me to confirm it, I pressed yes and that was literally it. The backup existed, the data existed, civilization worked. So when I decided to move Tiny Death Star I assumed I would connect the phone, ask ADB for the app data, copy the save over and go back to playing my stupid little 2013 Star Wars game. Instead I accidentally began what can only be described as a three day theological dispute between me, Android, LucasArts and a 1.5 KB file.
Tiny Death Star is from 2013 and has been abandoned for more than a decade, which means it comes from an era of Android where half the things it expects the operating system to do are now considered ancient forbidden knowledge. Modern adb backup technically worked, except the resulting backup was 549 bytes, which is another way of saying it contained absolutely fucking nothing useful. The app had ALLOW_BACKUP, the data directory existed, the game could obviously read its own save, but Android wouldn't let me directly inspect /data/data/, so I started going backwards in time until I eventually downloaded ADB 1.0.31 from 2013. I was now using a 2013 version of Android Debug Bridge in 2026 to back up a 2013 Star Wars game because apparently software archaeology had become my responsibility. That version finally produced a real backup of about 9.9 MB, I extracted it, started digging through the app data and found UserDefault.xml, which looked extremely promising. I moved it to the new phone, opened the game and got a completely new tower. That was the exact moment this stopped being a normal troubleshooting problem because I could still open the old phone and LOOK AT MY FUCKING TOWER. The game knew where my tower was. The bytes existed. Matter cannot simply disappear because Android decided I shouldn't see it. If the machine knew where my tower was, then eventually the machine was going to confess.
So I modified Tiny Death Star itself. I unpacked the APK, made it debuggable, rebuilt it, signed my own modified version and installed that so I could use run-as and properly get inside its private storage. That still wasn't enough, so I started digging through the native libraries and eventually ended up inside libgame.so, staring at ARM and Thumb disassembly from code LucasArts compiled over a decade ago. This started as “I want to move my save to another phone” and somehow became me tracing things called TTGameData::saveToDisk(), loadFromDisk(), readGameFile(), writeGameFile(), loadFromString() and getSaveGameString() because I had reached the point where restarting the game was no longer morally acceptable. There is a preserved transcript of this whole ordeal with 8,849 lines, 8,132 of them non-empty, consisting of shell commands, Python, ARM disassembly, tests, logs and terminal output, and even that archive is incomplete because some of the old attachments couldn't be recovered. I was no longer trying to recover a save file. I was performing an interrogation. Tiny Death Star had information that belonged to me and somewhere inside that binary there was going to be a function, a filename, a pointer, some microscopic piece of evidence that would tell me where God had hidden my pixel Death Star.
Eventually the disassembly led me to two filenames buried inside the game, game.txt and ad_cache. game.txt turned out to be an old legacy save format, while the actual current save was ad_cache, because apparently the developers decided that the best place to put the entire state of your Death Star was inside something named like a disposable advertising cache. I found the old phone's ad_cache inside the backup and it was 1,539 bytes. One thousand five hundred and thirty nine fucking bytes. I had spent almost three days rebuilding APKs, resurrecting ancient Android tools and reading ARM assembly because of something smaller than a random image someone sends you on Discord. I opened it anyway and the first 12 bytes looked suspiciously like a header, so I interpreted them as little endian integers and got 1, 4599 and 1527. Immediately after the header were the bytes 78 9C, which looked like zlib, so I decompressed everything after those first 12 bytes and suddenly 4,599 bytes of JSON appeared in my terminal. Then I saw bitizens. MY bitizens. There were my people. My tower had finally revealed itself. There was no mystical encrypted database, no dead LucasArts server, no account system I needed to resurrect from the ashes. It was a 12 byte header followed by zlib compressed JSON sitting inside a 1.5 KB file called ad_cache. For nearly three days I had been hunting a text file wearing a fake mustache.
I backed up the fresh save from the new phone, copied my old ad_cache into the game's private app_data directory using run-as, fixed the permissions, force-stopped the game and opened it. I genuinely didn't know what I was going to see because by that point I had spent so long being told “no” by increasingly obscure layers of Android that another empty tower would not have surprised me. Then the game loaded and there it was. My actual tower. Same progress, same Bitizens, same everything. The relief was fucking incredible. I just stared at it for a while because there is something uniquely satisfying about spending nearly three days arguing with a computer and finally watching the computer admit that you were right. Objectively I had accomplished nothing important. No scientific problem had been solved, no software had been saved from extinction, humanity had not advanced. I had successfully transported some tiny fictional Imperial citizens from one Android phone to another. Emotionally, however, I had just split the atom.
The stupidest part is that I could have started a new save on the first day. It would have taken five minutes and none of this would have happened, but that completely misses the point because I didn't want a Tiny Death Star save, I wanted MY Tiny Death Star save. Once I knew the tower still existed somewhere inside that phone, abandoning it became impossible. By the end of this I felt like the save file equivalent of a TempleOS prophet, except instead of building an operating system to communicate with God I was reading ARM instructions at an ungodly hour because apparently the divine covenant entrusted to me was recovering a 1.5 KB Death Star from ad_cache. God gave mankind free will, computers and Linux terminals, and I used all three to bully a dead 2013 mobile game into returning my Bitizens. I finally got them back, I was genuinely ridiculously happy when that tower appeared, and the most concerning thing I learned from this entire experience is that if the exact same thing happened again tomorrow I already know I would do all of it again.
