Why aren't my game changes saving?

If an edit disappears, the game either wrote its own copy over it, or the value lives somewhere CheatDroid can’t change. The first one is easy to fix.

The game was still running

A running game keeps every value in memory and writes it back to the file when it closes, over your change. When you open a file of a running game, CheatDroid says so and offers Force stop. Stop it, edit, save, then start the game again. That fixes most edits that “didn’t work”.

The value isn’t really in that file

• It lives in memory. Health during a fight or a timer may never reach a file. The memory scanner finds those; the guide shows how.
• It’s encrypted. A value that looks like random letters and digits can’t be edited by hand. Change it and the game reads garbage or ignores it.
• There’s a checksum. Some games store a checksum next to their data and reset everything when it no longer matches, even after a correct edit.
• It’s on a server. See below.

Online games

A game with an account or a cloud save keeps your real coins, levels and scores on its server. The phone holds the login and a cache, and a local edit is overwritten the next time the game syncs. Nothing on the phone changes that. CheatDroid’s network capture shows whether a game is that kind, so you know before you try.

CheatDroid works best on offline, single-player games. For one of those, start with the guide to hacking Android games.

If you made the game

Every wall on this page was put there by a developer. I tried CheatDroid on fifteen popular games and wrote down which of these each one had and which held, then what I’d add first, with code: how to protect your Android game from cheat apps.