Please Don’t Try to Hack the Sims Mobile

Electronic Arts’ soft launch is officially over; you can now download The Sims Mobile for Android and iOS . And when you start the first of many ( many) hours to fool your virtual companion with cool outfits and home accessories, I implore you: don’t hack the game.

Better not to look for a modified APK of the Android game. (Sorry Apple fans; you won’t be able to “jailbreak” much on iOS unless you have a jailbroken device, and even then it’s a pretty extreme step worth taking just for your Sim.)

Shut up i need simoleons

I am not suggesting that you avoid hacks because I especially love Electronic Arts or free mobile games. The former love the latter, and the latter can be quite insidious , especially for those who don’t realize how much their gambling addiction has grown until they do something wrong with their bank accounts.

I used to crack The Simpsons: Tapped Out. In fact, that was the only reason I was holding onto the old, almost unusable HTC One. I would use a modified APK to give myself unlimited donuts and access to all buildings in the game, supply my city with everything I need, sync the game with Electronic Arts servers and play it for real on my more advanced iPad.

While I have taken a few precautions to make myself feel safer when using the modified APKs, including running the game on HTC One with factory settings, with no identifying information and no link to my real email address (or any passwords that I use) with the game, it’s a risky business anyway.

For example, when you download pirated tax software, you have absolutely no idea who did what to the software you are using. Sure, you can find a clever way to get unlimited Simoleons, but it would be foolish to do it on your main device. A hacker may also have thrown a keylogger or malware in APK games, and even if you use sites like VirusTotal or NVISO ApkScan to check the APK, you never know if they found everything.

And even the sites where you download these modified APKs can seem sketchy. To get the latest updates to a cracked APK – since companies like Electronic Arts update their games frequently and break hacks – you’ll usually need to find and subscribe to some “modded gamez” forum to access the latest modified APKs. If you really don’t know what you are doing and just “Feel Lucky” with a Google search for “The Sims Mobile Hacked APK”, you are likely to end up with a fake download from an ad-filled spam site – or worse, a Hacked APK. which is doing your device more harm than good.

But I still need simoleons

Sigh. If you really, really have to cheat in The Sims Mobile, I have good news and bad news. So far, it does not appear that any modified APKs will work in a “real” environment. In other words, I haven’t seen anything that can be downloaded right now, loaded onto my Android device, and used to get unlimited access to game content and / or digital currency.

Some suggest using Android emulation programs on your desktop or laptop to download the game, and then using other third-party apps to directly modify the data in The Sims Mobile. I have not tried this technique; I’m just a messenger.

There is also some controversy over whether even such Android emulator programs are safe to install . If you really want the potentially glitchy experience of playing The Sims Mobile on your non-smartphone – which somewhat defeats the sense of a mobile game – at least run your emulator in a sandbox . (And let me know how it goes!)

I eventually stopped playing the hacked version of The Simpsons: Tapped Out because keeping up with the game’s updates and finding new hacked APKs that actually worked was more tedious than just playing the game as Electronic Arts intended. Of course, I didn’t even do that because I already felt burned out after spending months building a god city for free. In hindsight, I think that if I hadn’t, I could have had a lot more fun.

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