This 1 picture explains why Niantic is shutting down third-party Pokemon GO apps
Moans and groans around the world were heard when Niantic started bringing the hammer down on great third-party Pokemon GO companion apps like these. As much as most of you want to believe the company is the big bad wolf, they feel their intentions are good and their reasoning solid.
That reasoning is summed up in this image:
What you’re looking at is a graph of server requests before and after Niantic started refusing unauthorized requests. We’re not sure the scale of this graph as it’s completely devoid of any numbers, but if it’s accurate then it’s clear to see that these third-party apps were responsible for a huge chunk of activity that Niantic needs in order to continue launching Pokemon GO in more regions while maintaining server stability.
Beyond that, Niantic explains that these apps were accessing data that could be used more nefariously, such as in cheat apps which gave players unfair advantages. They also note the increasing amount of attempts from people trying to flat-out hack into their servers and snag a Mewtwo.
Their list of reasons is pretty long, but they’re pointing to server capacity as the number 1 influence in their decision to keep developers at bay, because they claim they wouldn’t have been able to launch in South America otherwise.
[via Niantic]