Trainers,
in order to understand how new PokéStops are added into the game, we have been monitoring 6 Ingress portal submissions over the past 20 days. We are now back with some solid results.
On Saturday June 24, the portal submissions were accepted via OPR and several new Portals have appeared in Ingress. They had pictures, titles and some had descriptions.
Today, morning of Tuesday June 27 in Croatia, we can confirm that at least 2 of those portal submissions have been added into Pokémon GO as PokéStops. It’s too early to verify all of them, we’ll update the article throughout the day when we verify the rest.
Kaštel Gomilica, the city where the new PokéStops have been added is considered a rural area and previously had only 2 PokéStops.
The list of Ingress portals we were monitoring (✅ means added, ❌ means it was not added to Pokémon GO):
- ✅ Cemetery Gates, Kaštel Gomilica, Croatia
- ✅ Lady Fountain, Kaštel Gomilica, Croatia
- ❌ Crkva (a Church, right next to Cemetery Gates), Kaštel Gomilica, Croatia
- Shut Portal, Kaštel Gomilica, Croatia
- Kip Magarca (Donkey Sculpture), Kaštel Gomilica, Croatia
- Fabijan i Jakov, Kaštel Kambelovac, Croatia
The curious case of “Crkva” and “Cemetery Gates” confirms that there is some algorithm behind the Ingress-to-Pokémon-GO data import, as those two portals were intentionally added one next to another. “Crkva” is a church roughly 20 meters from the Cemetery Gates. No nearby PokéStops exist.
We can also confirm the following:
- Ingress portal candidates are still being actively imported as Pokémon GO entities
- PokéStops appear in same places as Ingress portals
- As rumored, the import happens every week, on Monday evening, roughly around 00:00 UTC
- It can take as little as one week before a PokéStop is added on top of a newly added Portal
- An algorithm decides which portals will become PokéStops
Our readers have confirmed that a similar phenomena has been observed worldwide, with reports ranging from Australia, the land down under, all the way up to sunny California.
A huge shoutout goes to RDash123, a level 15 Ingress Agent and a Level 38 Pokémon Trainer for helping us observe, collect and confirm data for this article.
