[xorcist]

Not only must the three steps have been buggy, the whole "nearby" list is useless and/or wrong. Two friends walking together, with the same exact GPS position on the maps, can have vastly different nearby-lists, sometimes without even one entry in common. How is that even possible?

[aleksei]

It could be that, since the nearby listing holds only 9 entries, that there are more Pokemon nearby and the query to display them is unordered.