Why your favorite Live Pokémon Maps don’t work anymore.

A little flashback and summary

Pokémon GO still has all the attention online, but this time, it’s more negative than it can get. When the game was launched , little pawsteps indicated how close you were to a Pokemon, then came the 3 pawsteps bug, people resorted to live Pokemon GO maps as an alternative/workaround for the bug.

Now as it seems, with update 0.31.0, Niantic sent some cease and desist(s) to the creators of these live maps, most popular of them all , Pokévision. Now then, but Niantic fixed our 3 pawstep bug, by simply removing the concept of distance indicators completely (Happy Pokémon hunting!). Press interviews with Niantic say that these live maps like Pokévision were using 1000+ accounts to generate their maps, this in result was what was pushing the servers till where they’d give up.

What you need to know about the overnight API change

Once Pokévision was down, people seeked out some other maps, some that still worked.
And let’s not forget, Pokemon GO has its fair share of botters. These bots too used the same API to get the map objects (pokestops, gyms). So the game did get better for the normal public out there, no stuck pokeballs , very few glitches and fast logins a win-win overall. Then around at 4:00 pm EST 3/8/16 what Niantic did was, they updated their servers, something that was already planned , as 0.31.0 on android already works in compliance with the new server configuration; iOS users had to update their apps.
There were new checks added to the server, for a field called ‘Unknown6’ in the RPC call. This includes data like a timestamp , an unknown hash, and some other unknown data that the official client sends its requests. So the earlier unofficial API sent unknown6 as empty and still got a response with map objects. Now with the update, the server is accepting only a valid unkown6, else it’ll give an empty response, i.e empty map.

Current status

Enthusiastic developers are reverse engineering the data needed to make a valid unknown6 field.
The ETA can range from hours to weeks.
So hold tight, till then, don’t aimlessly wander around looking for Pokemon, walk well, hatch eggs and stay healthy.

This is all for now, hope you enjoyed the post, I’ll make sure to keep you posted when anything new takes place.

Demolasher36, signing out for now…