"Pokemon Go's" augmented reality feature has caused the emergence of a lot of players who would rather take the easy route. While the game has been designed to make a player step outside to hunt of level up Pokemon, some players have founds ways to still be able to do so without moving an inch. This, however, defeats the game's design and has been frowned upon by developer Niantic Labs Inc, and it has been reported recently that a lot of GPS tracking apps for Pokemon Go are no longer working right.
iDigital Times reports that those in the hacking scene have observed that internal beefs within Niantic have brought up an interesting dilemma. First is the case of an early GPS tracking app Go Scan which like most of its predecessors has been outright forced to halt development all throughout. The developer of the app rants on Reddit that it looks like Niantic has thrown a wrench at then that they cannot get past, then concludes that "it was a fun ride."
While it was up, Go Scan was downloaded over 100,000 times and was utilized to hunt down over 9 million Pokemon while it was still up and running. This move is seen as another example of Niantic's continuous commitment to halt third party services that make tracking Pokemon easier for a player. Since the step tracking in game tracking feature was removed, "Pokemon Go" players have resorted to apps like Go Scan to make hunting much easier and more bearable.
Other than that, other GPS mapping solutions have been recently shut down for API usage and alternatives which include PokeDetector and ScanGO has been blocked access to the service. At one point there had been free access to the API, the developers later on realized that more thatn 60% if its active players was actually coming from these solutions.
In order to keep the cost of the service fair enough for its owners and absolutely free for its players, they had to enforce restrictions on access. Developers are currently working on an API that is limited to six calls per minute as courtesy to developers who still wish to use FastPokeMap out of its main site. This is designed to effectively reduce server load and keep demand low enough in order to maintain the open policy of the project.
