Pokemon Go is now available on iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)
Pokemon Go has become the most popular mobile game ever released in the United States, and you can’t get to 21 million daily active users without having a few glitches. In addition to the constantly unstable servers, some players have encountered an issue where their game freezes after capturing a Pokemon. What can be done about this?
Essentially, this glitch appears to be popping up as a direct result of the server issues. What will happen is that you’ll throw the Poke Ball, it’ll bounce up and down, and then…nothing. Just when you’d expect the game to tell you you caught the Pokemon, it doesn’t.
Players have had mixed experiences with this glitch, but this is the solution that’s working for most people: Even though the Poke Ball is frozen, pay attention to the spinning white Poke Ball in the top left corner. This indicates that the game is loading; wait until that white ball disappears and then force close the app. What’s happening for a lot of people is that the animation of the Poke Ball has glitched, but the game itself has still registered that you caught the Pokemon. When you get back into the app, you should have the Pokemon in question captured.
Again, this solution is a bit hit and miss, as sometimes users will reopen the app and the Pokemon is completely gone. It seems to depend on when exactly in the process of capturing your app encountered the bug. Still other times players will find that the Pokemon isn’t in their inventory, but it’s back in the same area it was before, meaning they can have another go at capturing it.
If you’re encountering the glitch a lot, some users have also recommended waiting to throw your Poke Ball until after the spinning white Poke Ball icon disappears.
Finally, a second solution that has helped some iPhone 6 users is messing with the phone’s cellular settings. As one player suggested on Reddit, go to settings, cellular option, cellular data options, and turn off “enable LTE.” Some users have reported that doing this has allowed the game to run a bit smoother, although it’s not a permanent fix.
Though these solutions have been beneficial to many, they are unlikely to work 100 percent of the time. Really, the issue won’t be completely resolved until Niantic figures out a way to fix Pokemon Go‘s many bugs. In addition to this Poke Ball freezing issue, players have also encountered problems with the tracking system, as well as issues getting the game to open at all.