Pokemon Go is now available on iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)
Just two days after the previous update, Niantic Labs has released another patch for Pokemon Go. What’s different this time?
The short answer is not a whole lot. In the official description of the update, Niantic says that it provides “Performance improvement in Pokémon details and list screens” and “Correct link for app upgrade.” The translation for that is that they disabled the fast scrolling on the iOS version of the game, as this was causing the app to freeze for some players. Also removed is the map screen meant to show players where they caught any given Pokemon; as this had not been working, Niantic decided to remove it for now.
Otherwise, not much appears to be different, and there certainly is no fix for any of the game’s many bugs. In fact, this update only made many gamers more angry. In recent days, players have been leaving one star reviews on iTunes in order to express their frustration with the app becoming increasingly unplayable and with the lack of communication from Niantic. In the Apple store, an app’s rating is based only on reviews for the most recent update, and so releasing an update essentially resets the app’s rating. As a result, some began to speculate that Niantic had only come out with this update so soon in order to purge the negative reviews.
One Reddit user wrote, “If I tried my best to create a PR disaster I don’t think I could accomplish what Niantic has done in the last 2 days.”
Adding to this theory is the fact that there was no update released for Android; on the Google Play store, releasing an update does not alter the game’s rating.
The most recent Pokemon Go update was released on July 30th. Rather than doing anything to fix the three footstep glitch, a bug whereby all Pokemon appear to be three steps away, Niantic removed this feature from the game entirely. It is likely this was just done temporarily, though, as to not confuse gamers until the company can provide a proper fix. At Comic-Con, John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, said of the three footstep glitch that the company is aware of the problem.
Also removed in the most recent update was battery saver mode, and all of this created the impression that Nianitc was simply planning to gradually remove all of the app’s best features rather than try to fix any of them.
To make matters worse, Niantic has started shutting down third party tracking websites like PokeVision, which players had been using in order to get around the game’s own buggy nearby tracker.