Pokemon Go players gather in a park in Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong on July 26. (Getty)
Although Pokemon Go has been plagued by glitches, bugs and missing features over the past few weeks, new data shows that users are still playing the game just as much.
Sensor Tower found that from July 30th to August 1st, the average Pokemon Go user spent 26 minutes and 5 seconds playing the game each day. This is actually an increase from July 22nd to July 29th, when the average time spent in the app was 25 minutes and 40 seconds. Both numbers were higher than the amount of time the typical iPhone owner spent in the Facebook app.
This suggests that those who have stuck with Pokemon Go are not sinking any less time into the game due to the app’s various bugs. Sensor Tower’s data does not, however, include any information about the number of daily active players; it only concludes how much time players are pouring into the game.
But recent information from Survey Monkey shows that Pokemon Go‘s daily active users gradually declined from July 14th to July 20th, shortly after the three-step bug began. No data after July 20th is currently available, and so it remains to be seen if the number of active users has continued to drop since then.
Sensor Tower also took a look at the negative reviews of Pokemon Go that have been flooding app stores after the most recent update. They found that since this new update went online, 51 percent of reviews have been one star. The hatred has been especially vitriolic in Japan, where 75 percent of reviewers gave the game one star. The average rating for the app on iTunes is two stars as of August 4th.
A pair of updates released on July 30th and August 1st left a lot of players unhappy, as Niantic Labs removed the footstep tracker from the game entirely. They also got rid of battery saver mode, and in both cases, the features were removed due to glitches associated with them. In addition to leaving negative reviews, some players have been going to Apple and Google Play demanding refunds for the money they spent in the game.
