Pokémon Go is the number one app for iOS and Android
[via Polygon] On Friday, Apple confirmed that Pokémon Go got more downloads in its first week than any other app in the history of the App Store, which opened just over eight years ago on July 10, 2008. Apple won’t get any more specific than that, Nintendo are referring all inquiries about download statistics to The Pokémon Company, and nobody’s heard anything from them. The “mium” part of “freemium” means that Pokémon Go still makes money — anywhere from $1 million daily (according to Business Insider, or whomever they’ve semi-plagiarized) to $2.3 million daily (according to Superdata Research).
At the time of writing, Pokémon Go holds the number one position on the “Free” and “Top Grossing” charts of both the App Store and Google Play. Nicolas Beraudo, the EMEA managing director for the mobile analytics firm App Annie says that “I can easily envision a run-rate of over $1 billion per year with less server issues, a worldwide presence, and more social and [player vs. player] features.”
A Pokémon Go utility is the number 3 free app on the App Store
As I write this, the number 3 free app on the App Store is a third-party Pokémon Go utility app called Poké Radar. It’s a crowdsourced Pokémon location database that lets players find or submit Pokémon encounter locations worldwide. The image above is a screenshot from Poké Radar that shows user-submitted Pokémon encounters in my stomping grounds, the Tampa Bay area.
This likely won’t be the last third-party Pokémon Go utility; the current Pokémon craze and potential $1 billion pie means that even a small slice of the business is too big an opportunity to pass up. If you’ve got the time and the resources, you should try developing a Pokémon Go helper app.
Where to go if you’re thinking about writing a Pokémon Go app
Not surprisingly, a number of online resources for developers interested in building Pokémon Go tools have appeared online. This is a hot new topic, and you should expect to see new resources spring up quite often for the next few weeks, but here are the three best starting points that I’m aware of:
- The PokémonGoDEV subreddit is a good starting point. New links seem to be appear here on a steady basis.
- The Pokémon Go Development Archive is worth checking out from time to time. Among other things, it contains links to works in progress, APIs and libraries, and reverse engineering resources.
- Awesome PokémonGo is a GitHub repo that describes itself as “a curated list of awesome PokemonGo frameworks, libraries, software, resources and links.”
A word of warning: Some of the code pointed to by these resources appears to use not-necessarily-approved access to data streams between devices and Pokémon Go servers. All the standard “I am not a lawyer” and “Caveat implementor” warnings apply.