The 3rd party developers of FastPokeMap have broken the latest encryption that blocked 3rd party apps from accessing Pokemon Go servers, but there is one more layer that is holding them back.
The team assembled by the developer behind FastPokeMap has reverse-engineered the new encryption that Niantic put in place on Friday, October 7, besides one last hash function.
The team worked all weekend, but got held up by one last hash function that needs understanding reverse engineering. The creator of FastPokeMap summarized the current status of the project on Discord with this to-do list:
Pokemon Go player will have to wait another week until there is a chance again that FastPokeMap works again. The creator of FastPokeMap is only working on the weekends on reverse engineering the encryption.
Once finished the new Pokemon Go API will be released to the public. Initially whitelist_ip said to keep it private and only use it for FastPokeMap. By making it public, Pokemon bots and all other trackers and tools will be back accessing the Pokemon Go servers in real-time. I assume he changed his mind as he got now help from other developers.
The breaking of the new encryption is not removing the Captcha security measure. Google’s reCaptcha is still something FastPokeMap has to deal with. There are two ways to solve the Captcha issue. It is not clear yet how FastPokeMap will implement it. Either they pay a service like 2Captcha to solve the reCaptcha or users of FastPokeMap will be prompted to solve captchas while using the scanner.
Another issue that FastPokeMap and other real-time Pokemon scanner might be facing is the new reported speed limit catching Pokemon.
Running 3rd party Pokemon Go apps has become rather elaborate. There will be less apps and services going forward despite the demand from trainers. Pokemon Go is not as popular anymore as it has been and is also not that big of money maker anymore, but there are still tens of millions playing the augmented reality game. Pokemon Go dropped to 5th place in the top grossing apps on iTunes amidst the release of the latest Pokemon Go updates 0.41.4 (Android) and 1.11.4 (iOS).
A Niantic employee said in a panel in Los Angeles that Pokemon Go is not fully released yet and that it is page 1 of chapter 1. This is promising, if the trainers do not loose patients and quit the game. Niantic has still no release schedule for the in-app Pokemon tracker, which is considered basic functionality that is not in the app since three months.
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