It is official, GPS spoofing could be soon be a thing of the past! Niantic Support, the official Support twitter account for Ingress and Pokémon GO, tweeted out the following today:
Thanks for all your reports. We’re working to add functionality to stop spoofing, and your reports are helping us with our investigations.
— Niantic Support (@NianticHelp) April 18, 2017
Based on our sources close to Niantic, we’ve earlier reported/leaked that they are working on a set of functionalities to stop spoofing, but it is now official.
The big news here is not only that such functionality is in development, but that player reports are also taken into account. In other words, every report players make counts for something!
We’ve reached out to our “close-to-Niantic” sources and they confirmed that player reports are respected and investigated, however, there are a few problems with them currently:
- Niantic doesn’t have automated tools to group similar reports yet
- The team is busy with current feature development and they’re addressing more pressing support tickets
- “Google is slowly helping out on their end” – no further info was shared, most likely referencing the Android 7.1 update
When asked if there is a possibility of launching a community powered system for handling reports, similar to the League of Legends Tribunal, the source refused to comment directly, but hinted that there are currently no plans for such a system.
As far as the new Android security update goes, it seems that almost everyone that’s using Android 7.1 is unable to use any GPS spoofing apps, as the Android OS is now correctly highlighting apps that mock GPS.
