I did not expect a Part 2 for this to come so fast but look where we are. Check out Part 1 here.
How to Change Your Device’s User Agent to Download Machi-Chara
Amazingly, getting websites to recognize your device as an old Docomo android phone is simply by changing the user agent. One way you can do this on Android is using Kiwi Browser and downloading the Chrome extension User-Agent Switcher and Manager.
Once you have the extension installed, user the following user agent.
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; F-04J) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36Just like that, the download buttons appear, and the Machi-Chara can be installed.
As a reminder, here are the two websites with active Machi-Chara downloads (note that either of these could be taken down any time after I publish this post, and I do not guarantee that they work).
Alternatives
What if I want to download different files? What if these links go down? What if I don’t feel like changing my user agent?
We don’t have a solution for this but there are a few that seem feasible, though challenging.
Option 1: Decompile the app and recompile it with the .mcc/.mcn files injected. This doesn’t seem too complicated on the surface, but this app does not want to recompile any time I use apktool.
Option 2: Edit the .mcc/.mcn files themselves to remove site-bases restrictions. This also seems possible though we do not have a tool for editing .mcc/.mcn files directly. The Machi-Chara Maker SDK appears to only work with project files (.mcnp), so perhaps it would be necessary to manipulate the hex code directly.
Part 3 will come once one of these solutions has been fully explored. If you want to help figure this out, hop on over to Keitai Wiki Discord!