While Pokemon GO experienced a sharp drop in popularity in recent months, Niantic Labs’ augmented reality game is still enjoyed by millions of people worldwide. Due to that, the San Francisco-based studio is hard at work developing new features for its hit mobile game and delivering them as regular app updates. Now, another Pokemon GO patch just started rolling out on the Google Play Store yesterday. The said update brings the Android variant of the game to version 0.51.0 and introduces several improvements and bug fixes.
As revealed by the official Pokemon GO Facebook page, the annoying bug that sometimes caused the app to send false vibration notifications has been eliminated by the latest patch, so the game will stop notifying you of nearby pocket monsters when there aren’t any. Furthermore, Niantic also introduced some improvements to the in-game day and night cycle which will now supposedly better reflect the current time of day regardless of where in the world you’re located. Last but not least, the 0.51.0 changelog also lists “minor text fixes” which basically became a running gag among Pokemon GO players by now, seeing how Niantic is mentioning them with almost every update. As no obvious text changes have been made to the game, it’s possible that the San Francisco-based studio decided to embrace this community joke.
While this isn’t a major update by any means, it still provides for a better user experience in overall and serves as a sign that Niantic is still adamant to provide players with bug fixes and gameplay improvements as soon as possible. As long as the company manages to mix this kind of quality of life updates with additions of major features, it’s likely that Pokemon GO will continue enjoying a massive following for the foreseeable future. If you’re still unable to download the latest update, try again in a few hours as the said patch should be available globally by the end of the day. In related news, note that you still have nine more days to go out and capture a special Christmas edition of Pikachu who can be evolved into an equally unique Raichu. In addition to this holiday event, Niantic also recently started introducing new Pokemon to the game, and by most accounts, an in-game trading system is bound to roll out come next year.