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by throwawayReply 3633 days ago
I look forward to what they can further do to improve things.

For instance they don't cache pokestop images, my phone keeps redownloading the same images from pokestops and gyms, if it just cached the top 10 most visited pokestops and gyms that would be a decent reduction in data use.

Also it would help if they offloaded some of the work of the GPS onto the local phone steptracking/direction trackers it would help.

I can understand if they don't want to send coordinates of "nearby pokemon" down to the clients because that would inevitably get hacked, but the phone has to repeatedly poll.

If the phone tracked more locally it could not poll GPs until it detects locally that it's moved enough, so if you weren't moving you wouldn't be updating your position very often.

Also I read something that reckons that the game servers are currently all hosted in the US, which would explain the laggy battle experience in Europe. (Freezing at 1hp left, never being quite sure what's hit your character or good times to attack).

4 comments

Offloading the GPS work to the step/direction trackers in the phone would also be great for those of us that work in big old buildings that do a great job of blocking my GPS position.
More on the images, since the images are just the ones that were popular during Ingress (I mean the same images, like some of the ones I took a few years ago in Ingress are now in Pokemon), they probably could have done even more aggressive caching for the very popular spots.
FWIW I'm in the US and I get the laggy/soft locking up experience you mentioned all the time. I think they just didn't write the app to be very reselient to and RPC failures.
If the phone tracked more locally it could not poll GPS until it detects locally that it's moved enough, so if you weren't moving you wouldn't be updating your position very often.

That's how the Android Location service works, unless you intentionally bypass it. You ask the location service to update you when it determines the user has moved X feet.