It really annoys me that it doesn't actually need data to track distance (my little guy still navigates the map just fine, the app still runs, the phone knows exactly where I am, it'll even spawn pokemon if it already knows they're there, and if I walk between two wifi sources that are less than .25 km apart, it assumes it's just the connection glitching and counts it, but any longs and it doesn't) but it insists on having data to count the distance anyway just because, I guess?

Having poked around some more, it looks like my phone does not have the capability to do step tracking (I do have an iPhone too, but it's just old enough that it can't update to iOS 11, so pokego stopped working on it last winter). Oh well, another thing that in theory would have been really great but in practice just points up that pokego is really only designing for a certain subset of people.