If it could be mapped, it became a battleground. A portal could be a business, a school, a park, etc. It’s best known for Ingress, a real-world/sci-fi mashup where gamers travel to real places using Google maps and fight for supremacy of “portals” in the app. Monsters UnleashedĮnter Niantic, an augmented reality game maker led by former Google Earth developers. The response was so enthusiastic that suddenly everyone got real serious about it. In 2014, as an April Fool’s Day prank, Nintendo teamed up with Google Maps to make Pokémon monsters appear in real places using augmented reality. Now, the Pokémon franchise is worth over $46 billion. Kids continued to love it as they grew up and then came the anime manga, the trading cards, the TV cartoons, the dolls and the movies. It’s a game where you capture little monsters and make them fight each other – part insect collection and part sci-fi gladiator arena. Really, that’s all it is, but that’s exactly what people said when Nintendo released Pokémon 20 years ago. It’s both a best-case scenario and a cautionary tale. How did they do it? Why are so many people so upset about it? What lessons about better software performance can you take away from the whole experience? Here’s your instant history of an app that tapped into far more demand than the developers could handle. It’s also at the center of a media firestorm. By any mobile app performance metrics you want to use, Pokémon Go has been a smashing success. Even Facebook can’t hold up against the Pokémon onslaught. Today it has 3X more Android downloads than Tinder, nearly as many daily active users as Twitter and users spend twice as much time in the app as they do in the phenomenal Snapchat. Within a single week, Pokémon Go servers were slammed with traffic from 21 million players while they tried to fix production errors. Just 24 hours after it was released, it was the number one top grossing app, even though it was free to download and play. Every app developer dreams of the kind of success that Pokémon Go is enjoying right now.

Pokemon game maker app