Niantic has taken down Pokevision and other Pokémon Go Pokémon tracking services.
Before going offline, Pokevision allowed Pokémon Go players to pinpoint the exact locations of Pokémon on a Google Map. Currently, the website only displays a message stating that its service is no longer available. Other Pokémon tracking websites are reporting a similar message, but it is still unclear whether Niantic managed to block their access to the game's data or if it simply threatened them with legal action.
The "official" Pokevision Twitter account had little to share about the situation.
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— Pokevision (@PokeVisionGo) July 31, 2016
The crackdown occurred just a few hours after Niantic nerfed the game's tracking system and made pinpointing Pokémon locations considerably harder. The recent update reduced the tracker's effective range from 100m to 70m and removed the footprint indicator which helped the player gauge his distance to the Pokémon he's catching.
Needless to say, those changes didn't sit well with a lot of players who vented their rage by requesting refunds for recent in-app purchases. A Reddit thread with instructions for getting Pokémon Go in-app purchases refunded was upvoted more than 4,000 times in 12 hours. The thread instructs gamers to complaint to Google and Apple that "a game that tracks pokemon, now has no means whether ingame or third party to track the pokemon is a change in game function." According to the comments, most iOS players were able to get immediate refunds while Android gamers had to go through lengthy discussions that had mixed results with Google's support.
Gamers also bombarded the game's App Store and Google Play pages with a large number of 1-star reviews. The Android version of the game currently has a 3.9 rating with more than 292,000 1-star ratings, the majority of which were made recently. A similar sentiment is reflected in the game's App store ratings as it currently has a 3.5 stars rating across all versions and a 2-stars rating for the latest version only.
