Submit a news tip



Niantic

We heard yesterday that Niantic is looking into sponsored locations for Pokemon GO. Based on what folks have found after digging through the game’s code, McDonald’s may be up first. Australian student Manu Gill came across a reference to the fast food restaurant, while Redditor KcYoung discovered the actual logo.

Aside from McDonald’s, a few other interesting elements are buried within Pokemon GO’s code. This includes legendary monsters, a trading system, four additional types of berries and incense, an item called “sweet honey,” and natures like “stoic” and “raider”. Only time will tell what it all means!

Source, Image source

The latest data from SensorTower indicates that Pokemon GO has now been downloaded over 15 million times. That’s based on users across both iOS and Android.

According to iOS data from Monday, Pokemon GO is being played for an average of 33 minutes per day. That’s higher than Facebook (22 minutes) and Snapchat (18 minutes).

If you want to compare Pokemon GO to other mobile games, it’s behind Candy Crush Saga and Game of War. With those two titles, users spend an average of 43 minutes and two hours a day respectively.

Source

When Pokemon GO released last week, it did so in three regions. Australia and New Zealand were up first, followed by North America.

Now we can add another region to the list. Pokemon GO has launched in Europe, the app’s official Twitter account has confirmed.

Here’s the message:


Source

Pokemon GO isn’t slowing down, and it’s continuing to reach new milestones. Survey Monkey now reports that the app is the biggest mobile game in U.S. history, based on daily active users. It apparently attracted just under 21 million daily active users as of yesterday.

Within a day, Pokemon GO surpassed Slither.io and Clash Royale, the latter of which was the biggest game of 2016. It also took down the previous record holder Candy Crush. Note that Candy Crush was said to have 93 million total daily active users at its peak, but that was based on all countries and devices. Survey Monkey compared both apps on the basis of U.S. smartphone audience.

SurveyMonkey goes on to say that, given what we’ve seen thus far, Pokemon GO may pass Snapchat on Android very soon. It also speculates that it “could surpass Google Maps itself as the largest user of Alphabet’s mapping data.”

pokemon1_line

Source

Pokemon GO

Pokemon GO had its first update earlier today – version 1.0.1 / 0.29.1. However, iOS users may encounter issues after applying the patch. Polygon reports that Pokemon GO is locking out players who use their Pokemon Trainer Club account to access the app.

The first Pokemon GO update was mainly intended to fix bugs and make the experience smoother. For the full rundown, check out our post here.

If Niantic has anything to say about the situation, we’ll pass that along.

Twitch Plays Pokemon became a social phenomenon of sorts back in 2014. A channel was made so that viewers could go through the entirety of Pokemon Red by entering commands via chat. After the game was completed, other Pokemon titles took on the same premise on Twitch, and even other franchises as a whole.

Thanks to Pokemon GO, Twitch Plays Pokemon is back in the spotlight. Just like when the fun started with Pokemon Red, those who stop by the new channel can type in commands.

As for how this all works:

“Crowdsourced Pokemon Go! Twitch chat decides where to send our player. Our player moves based on the most popular commands in the chat (democracy mode).

My friend is standing in Central Park right now and following all of your commands. We’re running Pokemon GO on a real iPhone and simulating touch events to control the screen. The location is spoofed. We capped the max movement speed to keep it as ‘realistic’ as possible.”

Head past the break for the live stream.

Yesterday we mentioned that Pokemon GO had surpassed five million installs on Android devices. Now that number has increased. According to the official page from the Google Play store, Pokemon GO is now between ten million and 50 million installs.

Source

Niantic is starting to send out Pokemon GO’s first update. Version 1.0.1 / 0.29.1 is officially live on iOS, and should be available on Android shortly.

Here’s the full message about the update:

Thank you for your incredible response and support of Pokemon GO! We are working hard to improve the experience for everyone. This update focuses on making Pokemon GO more stable with the following improvements:

With Ingress, Niantic’s mobile app before Pokemon GO, the company charged the likes of fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other retail establishments to become sponsored locations. This same opportunity will be extended to their new game as well. Niantic CEO John Hanke told The New York Times that sponsored locations for Pokemon GO will be announced in the future.

Source

A lot of talk has been going around today about Pokemon GO and Google accounts. Users discovered that if you sign up for the app on iOS, Pokemon GO is given full access to your account.

There’s no reason to be concerned though. Niantic said in a statement that this was nothing more than an error, and Pokemon GO “only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your User ID and email address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected.”

Niantic added that the company already worked on a client-side fix after detecting the error “to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access.” Plans are in place for Google to reduce permissions “to only the basic profile data”, which will be done automatically.

Here’s the full statement from Niantic:


Manage Cookie Settings