Trainers,

Welcome a brand-new year with the Adventure Sync Hatchathon! To celebrate new beginnings, Trainers will enjoy bonuses for hatching Eggs from January 2 at 1:00 p.m. PST to January 15 at 1:00 p.m. PST. Make sure your shoes are tightly laced for a long journey, as you’re more likely to receive 5 km and 10 km Eggs from PokéStops and Gyms.

Don’t forget to activate Adventure Sync to make your steps count toward hatching Eggs while you’re on the go! Enjoy more ways to stay on top of your well-being for the New Year while working toward rewards with a weekly fitness summary as you start your New Year’s resolutions off on the right foot. See details for the event below:

Date + Time

• Jan. 2, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. PST (GMT −8) to Jan. 15, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. PST (GMT −8)

Bonuses

• 2× Hatch Candy
• 2× Hatch Stardust
• Higher chance of receiving 5 km and 10 km Eggs from PokéStops and Gyms

It’s time to hatch a plan to make the most of your Pokémon Eggs, Train...

Trainers,

One more legendary surprise is coming to Pokémon GO in 2018! The Fire- and Steel-type Lava Dome Pokémon, Heatran, will join Raid Battles across the world from December 18 at 1:00 p.m. PST to January 15 at 1:00 p.m. PST!

Be sure to assemble a team that includes Water-, Fighting-, and Ground-type Pokémon to take down this Legendary Pokémon before it overpowers your team with its massive strength!

Don’t miss this chance to catch this Legendary Pokémon before it returns to its mountain home! Stay safe, and happy exploring!

—The Pokémon GO team

Trainers,

The DNA Pokémon, Deoxys, has tested the strength of Trainers in EX Raids and has now changed form! Attack Forme Deoxys will be in EX Raid Battles, with more power than previously seen, so make sure your team is prepared. This Psychic-type Mythical Pokémon will be available to challenge beginning with the next cycle of EX Raid invitations, after December 20.

Are you new to EX Raids? You can become eligible to receive an EX Raid Pass when you win a Raid Battle at a qualifying Gym. You’ll be able to see which Gyms can host an EX Raid through a handy tag when you look at the Gym details. EX Raid Passes will give you the date and time when you’ll be able to challenge Attack Forme Deoxys, so mark your calendar and prepare your Pokémon for an epic battle!

Battling Attack Forme Deoxys will be a difficult challenge that requires Trainers to take advantage of every opportunity—so don’t forget to invite a friend to go along with you! Remember: invites can only...

Trainers,

The cheer and joy of the holidays is coming to the world of Pokémon GO, as the Delivery Pokémon, Delibird, returns for Pokémon GO Holidays 2018!

Starting on December 18, Ice-type Pokémon will appear more frequently in the wild, including Jynx, Sneasel, Swinub, Snorunt, Spheal, and Snover! Certain other Pokémon are also getting into the festivities—you might see holiday-ready Pokémon, such as a Pikachu wearing a festive hat, until January 2!

What’s celebrating the holidays without gifts? Pokémon such as Smoochum, Azurill, and Munchlax will have a greater chance of hatching from 7 km Eggs, so show your friends you care by sending them special Gifts! In order to help with hatching during the holiday season, Trainers will also earn a free single-use Incubator once per day via spinning a Photo Disc on a PokéStop until January 2.

To keep the celebrations coming, there will be plenty of bonuses throughout the event! From December 18 to December 22, Trainer...

Trainers,

Are you ready for a legendary challenge? From Friday, December 14, to Monday, December 17, there will be a Special Raid Weekend! Both the Psychic- and Flying-type Legendary Pokémon Lugia and the Fire- and Flying-type Legendary Pokémon Ho-Oh will be available in Raid Battles! Take a look at the details below:

Date + Time
- Friday, Dec. 14, 2018, at 1 p.m. PST (GMT −8) to Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, at 1 p.m. PST (GMT −8)

Features
- Legendary Pokémon Lugia and Ho-Oh will be joining Raid Battles!
- If you’re lucky, you may encounter a Shiny Lugia or Shiny Ho-Oh!

Do you have what it takes? Get ready to GO, Trainer—and best of luck!

Stay safe, and happy exploring!

—The Pokémon GO team

Alongside catching Pokémon and trading them with friends, there’s perhaps no greater hallmark of the core Pokémon experience than battling other Trainers. While Trainers have been able to participate competitively in Gym battles and cooperatively in Raid Battles thus far, we’re proud that Trainer Battles will be available to Trainers starting today.

When it comes to creating a fun and engaging Trainer Battle experience, we had to strike a careful balance. On one hand, we wanted the system to be easy and straightforward enough for any Trainer—even someone relatively unfamiliar with the mechanics of Pokémon video games. At the same time, we wanted to create a unique competitive experience that gave Trainers who are passionate about battle an avenue to create complex strategies. We accomplished this balance by implementing Trainer Battle Leagues and creating even more opportunities for Trainers to build battle strategies.

Even if you’re a casual Trainer who hasn...

Trainers,

From encountering and catching your first Pokémon to assembling a powerful team to take on a Legendary Pokémon in Raid Battles, you have certainly built incredible skills as a Trainer over the last two years. Are you ready for the next big challenge? Show off your skills against others with Trainer Battles, coming soon to Pokémon GO!

Beginning this month, Trainer Battles will allow you to challenge a friend or another Trainer at any time! Challenge another Trainer using a Battle Code, assemble a team of three Pokémon, and see who comes out on top! When Trainer Battles are completed, both participants will receive great rewards, including a chance at rare Evolution items.

In order to ensure an even playing field, Trainers must compete in the same Trainer Battle League, which determines the CP limit for the participating Pokémon. Strength alone will not en...

It’s getting closer. It’s been sort of like making a big meal for your friends or family. We have been sweating the details in the kitchen and now we are anxious and excited to share our creation with you.

Some of you have been in the kitchen with us. You’ve have done a great job of guiding us so far. Across Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Pokémon GO field testers have been collecting and battling with impressive regularity and we’re learning a lot from them. And today, we’re expanding that field test to the United States to get more feedback to improve the game.

It’s been exciting to hear stories from our testers as they explore the world around them in their quest to collect Pokémon and recently we’ve added a ton of new features to expand gameplay even further. Trainers can now help Pokémon evolve, opening up a whole new area of gameplay. Trainers can also find and collect Pokémon Eggs in addition to fully grown Pokémon. Trainers will get a good workout as you...

Our team has been making the most of the sunny California weather by walking long distances and enthusiastically testing all of the refinement and new features in Pokémon GO. Many of these refinements have been inspired by feedback received from our field testers in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and United States. Thank you for testing the app and for giving us such great feedback.

We have a few exciting updates to share. We’ve added a new Camera feature that enables Trainers to take photographs of their wild Pokémon encounters. Now you can take a photo of Squirtle next to that scenic lake or Ivysaur hanging out by the park. The photos will be saved to your phone’s camera roll to share with whomever you’d like. We can’t wait to see the varied environments in which trainers will find wild Pokémon.

We’re also thrilled to announce that Pokémon GO’s all-new music track is composed by GAME FREAK’s Junichi Masuda. We've been working closely with Masuda-san on several of the...

Five years ago, Niantic set out on a path to change the way people interact with the world around them by creating the world’s first “real world gaming” platform. By exploiting the capabilities of smartphones and location technology and through building a unique massively scalable server and global location dataset, we have helped users all around the world have fun, socialize, and get more fit as they play and explore. Ingress, our first “real world” game, has given millions of players an entirely new way to see the world around them.

Those players have coalesced into an amazing global community where players compete, collaborate, and celebrate in more than 200 countries around the world. Some have literally traveled to the ends of the earth in their quest to help their faction control the world. It’s the passion of this community that inspires us to come to work every day to create new experiences.

Which brings us to our next adventure together. We are pleased to ...

As of tonight, Trainers living in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland are able to download Pokémon GO from the Play Store or App Store.

Trainers,

We are excited to share a few more details with you regarding Pokémon GO:

1. Central and South America - Break out the sneakers and Poké Balls, and get ready to explore the world around you. We are excited to officially be putting Pokémon GO in the hands of our Latin American fans, visitors, and the athletes in Rio!

2. We have been hearing the feedback loud and clear about the removal of the Battery Saver mode on iOS devices. We had removed this feature as several users were experiencing it to be buggy, but we are fairly confident that a fix for this should roll out within the next several days.

3. A few of our Legendary Pokémon had erroneously been granted to some Trainers. Thanks to the help of several of our Trainers, we were able to locate them and bring them home safely.

We have been working long hours to fix many other bugs and bring some exciting new features to Pokémon GO in the future. However, next up for us is the continued roll-out of Pokémon GO to more...

Trainers,

Some iOS users might experience difficulties updating Pokémon GO from version 1.1.0 or earlier. Upon opening the Pokémon GO app, users prompted to update within the app may be redirected to an incorrect web address.

Please visit the Help Center for information on how to resolve this issue.

Trainers,

As many of you know, we recently made some changes to Pokémon GO.

We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve upon the underlying design. The original feature, although enjoyed by many, was also confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals. We will keep you posted as we strive to improve this feature.

We have limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokémon GO to users around the world. The large number of users has made the roll-out of Pokémon GO around the world an... interesting… challenge. And we aren’t done yet! Yes, Brazil, we want to bring the game to you (and many other countries where it is not yet available).

We have read your posts and emails and we hear the frustration from folks in places where we haven’t launched yet, and from those of you who miss these features. We want you to know that we have been working crazy hours to kee...

Things have been pretty crazy here at Niantic over the last few weeks but despite all of the ups and downs we get up every day inspired by the original goals of Niantic -- to create an experience that encourages healthy outdoor exploration and social gameplay. Every positive story we hear (like this one from the UK) motivates us to keep working to support the game and continue the roll-out. Running a product like Pokémon GO at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself.

As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday. Since there has been some pu...

Trainers in 15 new countries and regions across Asia and Oceania can now officially download Pokémon GO from the Play Store or App Store. Discover Pokémon in the world around you!

Countries and regions include: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau

Trainers,

Pokémon GO has been updated to version 0.33.0 for Android and 1.3.0 for iOS devices. Below are some release notes and comments from our development team.

• Added a dialog to remind Trainers that they should not play while traveling above a certain speed. Trainers must confirm they are not driving in order to continue playing.
• Made improvements to the accuracy of a curveball throw
• Fixed a bug that prevented ”Nice,” ”Great,” and “Excellent” Poké Ball throws from awarding the appropriate XP bonuses.
• Fixed achievements showing incorrect Medal icons.
• Enabled the ability for Trainers to change their nickname one time. Please choose your new nickname wisely.
• Resolved issues with the battery saver mode on iOS and re-enabled the feature.
• Added visuals of Team Leaders Candela, Blanche, and Spark.
• We’re currently testing a variation of the “Nearby Pokémon” feature with a subset of users. During this period you may see some variation in the nearby Pokémon UI.
• Minor text f...

Trainers,

After reviewing many reports of in-game cheating, we have started taking action against players taking unfair advantage of and abusing Pokémon GO. Moving forward, we will continue to terminate accounts that show clear signs of cheating.

Our main priority with Pokémon GO is to provide a fair, fun, and legitimate game experience for all players. If our system has determined that you cheated, then you will receive an email stating that your account has been terminated.

If you do believe your account has been terminated incorrectly, you should report it to the Pokémon GO Help Center:

https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/requests/new?ticket_form_id=233187

The Pokémon GO Development team

Trainers,

Pokémon GO is in the process of being updated to version 0.35.0 for Android and 1.5.0 for iOS devices. Below are some release notes and comments from our development team.

• Implemented Pokémon Appraisal: Trainers will now be able to learn about a Pokémon’s attack and defense capabilities from their Team Leader (Candela, Blanche or Spark) to determine which of their Pokémon have the most potential for battle.

• We are still working hard on several new and exciting features to come in the future of Pokémon GO.

• Minor bot fixes

The Pokémon GO team

We continue to work to ensure the integrity of the game and the health of our servers by blocking unauthorized access and at times by banning offending accounts. This includes blocking bots, data scraping operations, and banning end user accounts associated with those activities. Some players may not have realized that some add-on map apps do more than just show you nearby Pokémon. Each end-user app can be used as a collection tool by the app creator, invisibly collecting and forwarding data to the app creator with or without the knowledge of the end user. These apps can have an effect similar to DDoS attacks on our servers. Because of this we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned. This is a small subset of the accounts banned.

As a result of some changes made to our infrastructure, we are now able to unban this set of accounts. Add-on maps which scrape data from our servers ...