THE NEW "NEARBY" TRACKER ROLLOUT (FINALLY) EXPANDS!

It had been almost 3 months since August 9th when, around 3am UTC, a new Pokemon tracker began appearing for users in San Francisco, CA.

The 'tracker' (named the NEARBY scanner) was geo-fenced to San Francisco, excluding other parts of the bay area like nearby Oakland - and the rest of the world! For months Niantic seemingly doubled down on infrastructure changes, and feature rollouts appeared to be largely put on hold. Alongside them, the experimental scanner. The geofence was not expanded.

But today, Niantic has finally announced that the geo-fenced boundaries of the NEARBY scanner are expanding! Areas included in the first wave are:

Pokemon Tracker Is Back, Available In Various Places!

Niantic continues to announce more exciting updates this week and this time its news we have been waiting for- the Pokemon tracker. That’s right, Niantic finally speaks out about the special tracker that was only available to San Francisco residents.

If you haven’t heard, Niantic was testing a special version of the Pokemon tracker in their home city. This tracker allowed trainers to know which Pokemon were nearby and provided their location based on the PokeStop that Pokemon was closest to. The tracker also provided directions to that same PokeStop.

The big news Niantic revealed was that they are planning to test this tracker to other cities besides San Francisco. The cities you will be able to test this tracker will be: Arizona, the Seattle area of Washington state, and the rest of the San Francisco Bay area. It seems Niantic is getting ready for a wider release of the tracker.

Adding more cities for the Pokemon Tracker will allow for more fine tuning of the tracker and more data collection to improve performance.

Some criticism from San Francisco players about the tracker is that the current version works really well for large cities that are rich in PokeStop. There is skepticism on how well smaller cities or towns can take advantage of the current version of the tracker.

Hopefully the new players from Arizona and Seattle can help Niantic improve the tracker so that all players can enjoy the Pokemon Tracker. Let us know what your expectation are for the new tracker.

Here is what Niantic Posted on Their Official Website

” Update on Nearby Feature
Trainers,

As you might be aware, we’re currently testing a variation of the Nearby Pokémon feature in San Francisco, California. Starting today, we will be expanding the ability for Trainers in parts of Arizona, the Seattle area of Washington state, and the rest of the San Francisco Bay area to test this version of the feature. We will continue to review community feedback, make changes if necessary, and roll this feature out to more regions.
The Pokémon GO team ”

It finally looks like we are gonna get the Tracking feature real soon!