Pokémon GO Mapping

When people ask me about this “project” I’m doing, I usually start by asking Do you know Pokémon GO?

Pokémon GO is about catching Pokémon in the real-world; You walk around in real life and Pokémon will appear on your phone’s screen that you can then catch. There’s also community-driven real-life points of interest that map to essential virtual locations, called Gyms and Pokéstops. The game released in summer 2016 and had me hooked. At that point I had not many prior touch points with the Pokémon franchise, but the game concept really settled with me.

One year after launch, Raids were introduced. Players have to team up in real life in order to beat a strong Pokémon and get a chance to catch it. This introduced an important social aspect to the game, leading me to connect with my local community. During this time I really started utilizing Maps, we had a simple website that showed the real-time location of all Pokémon, Gyms, Pokéstops and Raids in our town. We later unlocked IV scans for our area; now the Pokémon’s individual stats were scanned, making it easier to catch the really good and rare ones.

There’s a lot of great memories I made because of this IV map; a good Pokémon will appear at 3am at the outskirts of town; you go there by yourself just to find 30 other people standing at the side of the road. It truly was a one of a kind experience that will hardly ever be replicated.

Maps at the time were a real burden for Niantic, the maker of the game. They were in a constant cat and mouse game against the mapping community. Early 2018, Niantic won said game and was able to prevent arbitrary access to their endpoints completely. Cracking this at the time would’ve yielded millions of dollars, yet to this day, no one was able to do it. The scene died and most mappers quit.

Some people, however, were not let down this easily. Less than a year later, the first MITM solutions started appearing: Real phones, running real Pokémon GO apps with custom-made man-in-the-middle software would sit in people’s shelves. Controlled by a central service, this solution was able to bring back fully automated maps, yet at much smaller scale. What was previously thousands of accounts, now had to be single-digit. It was all very costly and a very complicated setup.

This was the time I was first starting to get into mapping. Missing our old IV map and knowing no one else would set up something this complicated for us, I decided to tackle the challenge myself. With very little former computer knowledge, I was able to get my first setup running after about a week of 10-12 hour days. With about 10 Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7’s sitting in my desk’s drawer, all hooked up to a little VPS I had rented. It was a modest setup that took away all my freetime for the next couple of months. But I was really proud and happy with what I had achieved.