Niantic Labs, developer of "Pokemon Go," has been getting flak for last week's update to the game that removed so much features players loved: namely, the Pokemon tracking feature, and subsequent support of third-party tracking apps like Pokevision. And that's on top of several new bugs the update caused (which may or may not have been addressed in today's new update).
According to Niantic, the third-party apps were messing with the resource usage of the "Pokemon Go" servers, and their elimination freed up so much space, allowing them to expedite the game's launching into new territories. And sure enough, last Saturday 15 new countries finally got access to the game.
Although they've banned third-party trackers, apparently Niantic has not targeted bot apps that allow players to play "Pokemon Go" in the background. These bots are apparently fully capable of playing and using all the features of the game, including travel, catching Pokemon, using PokeStops, and battling gyms. We're not exactly sure how this is possible, but it is apparently possible.
So far, Niantic has either not addressed these bots or are simply unaware of their existence. All they've been targeting lately are GPS cheaters, for which they've been serving hour-long bans from "Pokemon Go." Since the ban is so short and never enacts a longer penalty on the violator, it pretty much amounts to a slap on the wrist.
We're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume they don't know about these hacks or are already hard at work on a solution. Let's hope it's the latter, as these cheaters are really ruining the "Pokemon Go" experience for everyone--and it's impossible for Niantic to really not be aware, if they were able to detect third-party apps and GPS cheaters.
