Last week, Niantic Labs CEO John Hawke hinted in an interview that certain Pokemon locating services would more than likely be shut down in the near future.
Come Saturday, one of the most popular websites, Pokevision.com said that it was “currently unavailable”. The service saw an explosion of usage with 27 million unique users logging in over a 5 day period. He originally created the app because it was hard for users to track Pokemon in its current form. The broken footstep tool has now been completely removed in the latest Pokemon GO update.
The PokeVision Twitter account tweeted out the below. We don’t see it coming back anytime soon.
Hey guys. We wish we had some news for you
At this moment, we are respecting Niantic and Nintendo's wishes.
Will keep you guys posted
<3
— Yang (@PokeVisionGo) July 31, 2016
Another less popular Pokemon-location service, PokeHound.com is also down and displaying a cryptic message “We tried our best 🙁 – Check Twitter for updates”.
Niantic are able to shut down these websites as they collect data from the Pokemon GO servers, which according to the Pokemon GO T&C’s is a direct violation of policy.
Personally, I think it’s sad to see something like PokeVision taken away as it was incredibly well-built and was definitely bringing people closer together, but in this instance I can understand Niantics want to take away a service that is almost counter-productive
