Recent reports confirm that Niantic has used their new Ingress OPR tool to add a large amount of new PokéStops and Gyms in select countries around the world!
Additionally, the reports confirm that not all countries (areas) were affected. Most of the additions occurred in areas well covered by Ingress players, who have submitted portal requests earlier. In other words, whether you got new PokéStops/Gyms, depends solely on the activity of high level Ingress players in your area.
We’ve created a list of countries that received new PokéStops (data collected via Twitter, reddit and e-mail). Be aware that this list is not exhaustive and definitive.
There’s certainly more countries that received changes, but trainers haven’t reported it yet:
- United Kingdom
- Sweden
- Germany
- Portugal
- Argentina
- Mexico
- France
- Slovakia
- NEW Czech Republic
- NEW Denmark
- NEW Taiwan
- NEW Japan
Unfortunately, no reports for India and general North American region.
Update: 64000 new portals were added to Ingress in the first week of OPR, explaining the influx of new PokéStops!
Operation Portal Recon week one:, 50k unique portals analyzed, 116k rejected, and 64k new portals created. pic.twitter.com/GW08LDNgP4
— Ingress (@ingress) May 17, 2017
For those who are unfamiliar with OPR (Open Portal Recon), OPR is a tool used to review Ingress portal submissions. The tool was just recently made available worldwide, in an effort to help Niantic deal with the huge backlog of portal submissions.
High level Ingress players (Level 16) have managed to chew through 25% of the backlog in a matter of days, reviewing tens and hundreds of thousands portals. These changes vary from portal additions, removals to small text and picture updates to existing portals.
How to get new PokéStops using Ingress
Niantic has confirmed that they do periodically sync Pokémon GO map and Points of Interests with Ingress, by importing portal changes (text updates, additions, removals) to Pokémon GO.
That process takes place roughly every five days, as observed by our local Ingress and Pokémon GO masterminds. The process aggregates updates applied to Ingress in the previous X days, mapping them into corresponding Pokémon GO points of interest and changes.
We’ll be updating this article as new info becomes available. If your country was affected and is not mentioned in the list above, let us know.
