Adventure Sync & Let's Go research

[ephemera]

Thing the first: we're nearly three weeks into the new "Adventure Sync" feature, and - how's it working out for you?

Thing the second: New research! (spoilers in link) What do you think? How are you doing?

Comments

[melannen]

I'm on Android, and it's entirely possible my pedometer's screwed up (or doesn't work on my phone); I've never used it for anything before. I'll have to mess with it more now that I know it does work that way for other people.

[recessional]

thumbs up

Yeah as long as I'm carrying the phone it tracks my steps - you have to make sure that option's on in settings (the privacy section, on iPhone, obvi I have no idea on Android!), but then it just tracks steps and distance and feeds that via Health to PokeGo.

Fitbit tends to think I take a few more steps than Health does but over the last week the counts for when I've been carrying the phone have been within fifty steps of each other. When I do treadmill later I'll turn off data and wifi both just to double check.

[ephemera]

There seems to be a *ton* of variables for Android, which makes it tricky. I definitely noticed distance being added when my android phone is with me walking around inside, and the game is off, but I usually have at least weak wifi or data while I'm doing that, so that may not be a helpful data point.

If you have the game on, it's tracking distance via GPS (but needs a data connections, because game) With the game closed, it's taking data from Google Fit, and I don't know how that works with no data. I guess the first troubleshooting question is "Is Google Fit getting step data on you?" - you have to make sure that Google Fit and PoGo have mutual permissions, and thus far no data imported from any third party pedometer except an Apple Watch seems to be counted for Adventure Sync

[melannen]

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.

[ephemera]

That is, indeed, supremely annoying of them! Adventure Sync does seem to be highlighting the device divide. (I don't know if it helps any to know that their main site just says "Samsung 8 users - sorry, you're SOL" so it's not just those of us on older phones!)